



PRESENTED BY 



Ay 

/SO 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 




C^KZ^CeJ of^ 



a^^^ 



CHARLES LAilB 
From the original eIlgra^^^lg by Henry Meyer 
(after his own painting) in the collection of 
Ernest Dressel North, Esq. 



Zbe Centura Classtcs 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 

BY 

CHAELES LAMB 

WITH THE APPRECIATION OF LAMB BY 
WALTER PATER 




NEW YOEK 

Ube Centuri? Co* 

MCMII 



>"'^"J\ir 






o 






The text of this volume is that of the 1836 Moxon 
edition of the Essays. 

P. 

Publ. 
2?JtHtt 



*v* • • •• 



Published October, 1902 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Charles Lamb vii 

The South Sea House 3 / 

Oxford in the Vacation 18 

A Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years 

Ago '^. 29 ^ 

y The Two Eaces op Men 53 

\ New Year's Eve 63 

Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist ... 75 ' 

A Chapter on Ears 88 ^ 

All Fools' Day 97 

A Quakers' Meeting 104 

The Old and the New Schoolmaster . 113 

Imperfect Sympathies 129 

Witches, and Other Night Fears ... 144 

Valentine's Day 156 

My Relations . / 162 '^ 

Mackery End, in Hertfordshire ... 174 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

> My First Play 183 

' Modern Gallantry 192 

The Old Benchers op the Inner Temple 200 ^' 

Grace Before Meat 220 

Dream Children ; A Reverie . . . . 233 - 

Distant Correspondents. In a Letter 
TO B. F., Esq., at Sydney, New South 

Wales 241 

^The Praise op Chimnby-Sweepbrs ... 252 '^ 

A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars, 

in the Metropolis 265 

/ A Dissertation upon Roast Pig .... 279 ^ 

A Bachelor's Complaint op the Beha- 
vior OP Married People 292 

On Some op the Old Actors 805 

On the Artificial Comedy op the Last 

Century 326 

On the Acting op Mundbn 341 



CHARLES LAMB 



THOSE English critics v/lio at the be- 
ginning of the present century intro- 
duced from Germany, together with 
some other subtleties of thought trans- 
planted hither not without advantage, the 
distinction between the Fancy and the Im- 
agination, made much also of the cognate 
distinction between Wit and Humor, be- 
tween that unreal and transitory mirth, 
which is as the crackling of thorns under 
the pot, and the laughter which blends 
with tears and even with the sublimities 
of the imagination, and which, in its most 
exquisite motives, is one with pity— the 
laughter of the comedies of Shakspere, 
hardly less expressive than his moods of 
seriousness or solemnity, of that deeply 
stirred soul of sympathy in him, as flowing 
from which both tears and laughter are 
alike genuine and contagious. 

This distinction between wit and humor, 

iFrom "Appreciations," by Walter Pater. Reprinted by 
permission of the Macmillan Company. 



CHARLES LAMB 



Coleridge and other kindred critics applied, 
with much effect, in their studies of some 
of our older English writers. And as the 
distinction between imagination and fancy, 
made popular by Wordsworth, found its 
best justification in certain essential dif- 
ferences of stuff in Wordsworth's own 
writings, so this other critical distinction, 
between wit and humor, finds a sort of 
visible interpretation and instance in the 
character and writings of Charles Lamb;— 
one who lived more consistently than most 
writers among subtle literary theories, and 
whose remains are still full of curious in- 
terest for the student of literature as a 
fine art. 

The author of the English Humorists of 
the Eighteenth Century, coming to the hu- 
morists of the nineteenth, would have 
found, as is true preeminently of Thackeray 
himself, the springs of pity in them deep- 
ened by the deeper subjectivity, the inten- 
ser and closer living with itself, which is 
characteristic of the temper of the later 
generation; and therewith, the mirth also, 
from the amalgam of which with pity humor 
proceeds, has become, in Charles Dickens, 
for example, freer and more boisterous. 



CHARLES LAMB 



To this more high-pitched feehng, since 
predominant in our Hterature, the writings 
of Charles Lamb, whose hfe occupies the 
last quarter of the eighteenth century and 
the first quarter of the nineteenth, are a 
transition; and such union of grave, of ter- 
rible even, with gay, we may note in the 
circumstances of his life, as reflected 
thence into his work. We catch the aroma 
of a singular, homely sweetness about his 
first years, spent on Thames' side, amid 
the red bricks and terraced gardens, with 
their rich historical memories of old-fash- 
ioned legal London. Just above the poorer 
class, deprived, as he says, of the " sweet 
food of academic institution," he is fortu- 
nate enough to be reared in the classical 
languages at an ancient school, where he 
becomes the companion of Coleridge, as at 
a later period he was his enthusiastic dis- 
ciple. So far, the years go by with less 
than the usual share of boyish difficulties; 
protected, one fancies, seeing what he was 
afterwards, by some attraction of temper 
in the quaint child, small and delicate, with 
a certain Jewish expression in his clear, 
brown complexion, eyes not precisely of the 
•f;' r color, and a slow walk adding to the 



CHARLES LAMB 



staidness of his figure; and whose infirmity 
of speech, increased by agitation, is partly 
engaging. 

And the cheerfulness of all this, of the 
mere aspect of Lamb's quiet subsequent 
life also, might make the more superficial 
reader think of him as in himself some- 
thing slight, and of his mirth as cheaply 
bought. Yet we know that beneath this 
blithe surface there was something of the 
fateful domestic horror, of the beautiful 
heroism and devotedness too, of old Greek 
tragedy. His sister Mary, ten years his 
senior, in a sudden paroxysm of madness, 
caused the death of her mother, and was 
brought to trial for what an overstrained 
justice might have construed as the great- 
est of crimes. She was released on the 
brother's pledging himself to watch over 
her; and to this sister, from the age of 
twenty-one, Charles Lamb sacrificed him- 
self, " seeking thenceforth," says his ear- 
liest biographer, "no connection which 
could interfere with her supremacy in his 
affections, or impair his ability to sustain 
and comfort her." The "feverish, roman- 
tic tie of love," he cast away in exchange 
for the "charities of home." Only, from 



CHARiLES LAMB 



time to time, the madness returned, affect- 
ing him too, once; and we see the brother 
and sister voluntarily yielding to restraint. 
In estimating the humor of Elia, we must 
no more forget the strong undercurrent of 
this great misfortune and pity than one 
could forget it in his actual story. So he 
becomes the best critic, almost the discov- 
erer, of Webster, a dramatist of genius so 
somber, so heavily colored, so macabre. 
Rosamund Grey, written in his twenty- 
third year, a story with something bitter 
and exaggerated, an almost insane fixed- 
ness of gloom perceptible in it, strikes 
clearly this note in his work. 

For himself, and from his own point of 
view, the exercise of his gift, of his literary 
art, came to gild or sweeten a life of mo- 
notonous labor, and seemed, as far as re- 
garded others, no very important thing; 
availing to give them a little pleasure, and 
inform them a little, chiefly in a retrospec- 
tive manner, but in no way concerned with 
the turning of the tides of the great world. 
And yet this very modesty, this unambi- 
tious way of conceiving his work, has 
impressed upon it a certain exceptional 
enduringness. For of the remarkable 



CHARLES LAMB 



English writers contemporary with Lamb, 
many were greatly preoccupied with ideas 
of practice— religious, moral, political— 
ideas which have since, in some sense or 
other, entered permanently into the gen- 
eral consciousness; and, these having no 
longer any stimulus for a generation pro- 
vided with a different stock of ideas, the 
writings of those who spent so much of 
themselves in their propagation have lost, 
with posterity, something of what they 
gained by them in immediate influence. 
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley even— 
sharing so largely in the unrest of their 
own age, and made personally more inter- 
esting thereby, yet, of their actual work, 
surrender more to the mere course of time 
than some of those who may have seemed 
to exercise themselves hardly at all in 
great matters, to have been little serious, 
or a little indifferent, regarding them. 

Of this number of the disinterested ser- 
vants of literature, smaller in England 
than in France, Charles Lamb is one. In 
the making of prose he realizes the princi- 
ple of art for its own sake, as completely 
as Keats in the making of verse. And, 
working ever close to the concrete, to the 



CHARLES LAMB 



details, great or small, of actual things, 
books, persons, and with no part of them 
blurred to his vision by the intervention of 
mere abstract theories, he has reached an 
enduring moral effect also, in a sort of 
boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he 
might seem, with great matters, he is in 
immediate contact with what is real, es- 
pecially in its caressing littleness, that 
littleness in which there is much of the 
whole woeful heart of things, and meets it 
more than half-way with a perfect under- 
standing of it. What sudden, unexpected 
touches of pathos in him!— bearing witness 
how the sorrow of humanity, the Welt- 
schmerz, the constant aching of its wounds, 
is ever present with him: but what a gift 
also for the enjoyment of life in its subtle- 
ties, of enjoyment actually refined by the 
need of some thoughtful economies and 
making the most of things! Little arts of 
happiness he is ready to teach to others. 
The quaint remarks of children which an- 
other would scarcely have heard, he pre- 
serves—little flies in the priceless amber 
of his Attic wit— and has his Praise of 
Chimney -sweepers (as William Blake has 
written, with so much natural pathos, the 



CHARLES LAMB 



Chimneysweeper's Song), valuing carefully 
their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of 
white sheets in stolen sleep at Arundel 
Castle, as he tells the story, anticipating 
something of the mood of our deep hu- 
morists of the last generation. His sim- 
ple mother-pity for those who suffer by 
accident, or unkindness of nature, blind- 
ness for instance, or fateful disease of 
mind like his sister's, has something prim- 
itive in its largeness; and on behalf of ill- 
used animals he is early in composing a 
Pity's Gift. 

And if, in deeper or more superficial 
sense, the dead do care at all for their name 
and fame, then how must the souls of 
Shakspere and Webster have been stirred, 
after so long converse with things that 
stopped their ears, whether above or below 
the soil, at his exquisite appreciations of 
them; the souls of Titian and of Hogarth 
too; for, what has not been observed so 
generally as the excellence of his literary 
criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic of 
painting also. It was as loyal, self-forget- 
ful work for others, for Shakspere's self 
first, for instance, and then for Shak- 
spere's readers, that that too was done: 



CHARLES LAMB 



he has the true scholar's way of forgetting 
himself in his subject. For though "de- 
frauded/' as we saw, in his young years, 
"of the sweet food of academic institu- 
tion," he is yet essentially a scholar, and 
all his work mainly retrospective, as I 
said; his own sorrows, affections, percep- 
tions, being alone real to him of the pres- 
ent. " I cannot make these present times," 
he says once, "present to me.'^ 

Above all, he becomes not merely an ex- 
positor, permanently valuable, but for Eng- 
lishmen almost the discoverer of the old 
English drama. "The book is such as I 
am glad there should be," he modestly 
says of the Specimens of English Dramatic 
Poets who lived about the time of Shak- 
spere; to which, however, he adds in a 
series of notes the very quintessence of 
criticism, the choicest savor and perfume 
of Elizabethan poetry being sorted, and 
stored here, with a sort of delicate intellec- 
tual epicureanism, which has had the effect 
of winning for these, then almost forgot- 
ten, poets, one generation after another of 
enthusiastic students. Could he but have 
known how fresh a source of culture he 
was evoking there for other generations. 



CHARLES LAMB 



through all those years in which, a little 
wistfully, he would harp on the limitation 
of his time by business, and sigh for a 
better fortune in regard to literary oppor- 
tunities! 

To feel strongly the charm of an old 
poet or moralist, the literary charm of 
Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or the 
Duchess of Newcastle; and then to inter- 
pret that charm, to convey it to others- 
he seeming to himself but to hand on to 
others, in mere humble ministration, that 
of which for them he is really the creator 
—this is the way of his criticism: cast off 
in a stray letter often, or passing note, or 
lightest essay or conversation. It is in 
such a letter, for instance, that we come 
upon a singularly penetrative estimate of 
the genius and writings of Defoe. 

Tracking, with an attention always alert, 
the whole process of their production to 
its starting-point in the deep places of the 
mind, he seems to realize the but half- 
conscious intuitions of Hogarth or Shak- 
spere, and develops the great ruling unities 
which have swayed their actual work; or 
"puts up," and takes, the one morsel of 
good stuff in an old, forgotten writer. Even 



CHARLES LAMB 



in what he says casually there comes an 
aroma of old English; noticeable echoes, in 
chance turn and phrase, of the great mas- 
ters of style, the old masters. Godwin, 
seeing in quotation a passage from John 
Woodvil, takes it for a choice fragment of 
an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb to 
assist him in finding the author. His 
power of delicate imitation in prose and 
verse reaches the length of a fine mimicry 
even, as in those last essays of Elia on 
Popular Fallacies, with their gentle re- 
production or caricature of Sir Thomas 
Browne, showing, the more completely, his 
mastery, by disinterested study, of those 
elements of the man which were the real 
source of style in that great, solemn mas- 
ter of old English, who, ready to say what 
he has to say with fearless homeliness, yet 
continually overawes one with touches of a 
strange utterance from worlds afar. For 
it is with the delicacies of fine literature 
especially, its gradations of expression, its 
fine judgment, its pure sense of words, of 
vocabulary— things, alas! dying out in the 
English literature of the present, together 
with the appreciation of them in our liter- 
ature of the past— that his literary mission 



CHARLES LAMB 



is chiefly concerned. And yet, delicate, re- 
fining, daintily epicurean, as he may seem, 
when he writes of giants such as Hogarth 
or Shakspere, though often but in a stray 
note, you catch the sense of veneration 
with which those great names in past liter- 
ature and art brooded over his intelligence, 
his undiminished impressibility by the 
great effects in them. Reading, comment- 
ing on Shakspere, he is like a man who 
walks alone under a grand stormy sky, and 
among unwonted tricks of light, when 
powerful spirits might seem to be abroad 
upon the air; and the grim humor of Ho- 
garth, as he analyzes it, rises into a kind 
of spectral grotesque; while he too knows 
the secret of fine, significant touches like 
theirs. 

There are traits, customs, characteristics 
of houses and dress, surviving morsels of 
old life, such as Hogarth has transferred 
so vividly into The Rake's Progress, or 
Marriage a la Mode, concerning which we 
well understand how, common, uninter- 
esting, or even worthless in themselves, 
they have come to please us at last as 
things picturesque, being set in relief 
against the modes of our different age. 



CHARLES LAMB 



Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff fur- 
niture—types of cast-off fashions, left by 
accident, and which no one ever meant to 
preserve— we contemplate with more than 
good nature, as having in them the verita- 
ble accent of a time, not altogether to be 
replaced by its more solemn and self-con- 
scious deposits; like those tricks of indi- 
viduality which we find quite tolerable in 
persons, because they convey to us the se- 
cret of lifelike expression, and with regard- 
to which we are all to some extent humor- 
ists. But it is part of the privilege of the 
genuine humorist to anticipate this pensive 
mood with regard to the ways and things 
of his own day; to look upon the tricks 
in manner of the life about him with that 
same refined, purged sort of vision, which 
will come naturally to those of a later gen- 
eration, in observing whatever may have 
survived by chance of its mere external 
habit. Seeing things always by the light 
of an understanding more entire than is 
possible for ordinary minds, of the whole 
mechanism of humanity, and seeing also 
the manner, the outward mode or fashion, 
always in strict connection with the spir- 
itual condition which determined it, a hu- 



CHARLES LAMB 



morist such as Charles Lamb anticipates 
the enchantment of distance; and the char- 
acteristics of places, ranks, habits of life, 
are transfigured for him, even now and in 
advance of time, by poetic light; justifying 
what some might condemn as mere senti- 
mentality, in the effort to hand on un- 
broken the tradition of such fashion or 
accent. "The praise of beggars," "the 
cries of London," the traits of actors just 
grown "old," the spots in "town" where 
the country, its fresh green and fresh 
water, still lingered on, one after another, 
amidst the bustle; the quaint, dimmed, just 
played-out farces, he had relished so much, 
coming partly through them to under- 
stand the earlier English theater as a thing 
once really alive; those fountains and sun- 
dials of old gardens, of which he enter- 
tains such dainty discourse:— he feels the 
poetry of these things, as the poetry of 
things old indeed, but surviving as an ac- 
tual part of the life of the present, and as 
something quite different from the poetry 
of things flatly gone from us and antique, 
which come back to us, if at all, as entire 
strangers, like Scott's old Scotch-border 
personages, their oaths and armor. Such 



CHARLES LAMB 



gift of appreciation depends, as I said, on 
the habitual apprehension of men's hfe as 
a whole— its organic wholeness, as extend- 
ing even to the least things in it— of its 
outward manner in connection with its 
inward temper; and it involves a fine per- 
ception of the congruities, the musical 
accordance between humanity and its en- 
vironment of custom, society, personal 
intercourse; as if all this, with its meet- 
ings, partings, ceremonies, gesture, tones 
of speech, were some delicate instrument 
on which an expert performer is playing. 

These are some of the characteristics of 
Elia, one essentially an essayist, and of the 
true family of Montaigne, "never judging," 
as he says, "system-wise of things, but 
fastening on particulars "; saying all things 
as it were on chance occasion only, and 
by way of pastime, yet succeeding thus, 
"glimpse-wise," in catching and recording 
more frequently than others "the gayest, 
happiest attitude of things"; a casual 
writer for dreamy readers, yet always giv- 
ing the reader so much more than he 
seemed to propose. There is something of 
the follower of George Fox about him, and 
the Quaker's belief in the inward light com- 



CHARLES LAMB 



ing to one passive, to the mere wayfarer, 
who will be sure at all events to lose no 
light which falls by the way— glimpses, 
suggestions, delightful half-apprehensions, 
profound thoughts of old philosophers, 
hints of the innermost reason in things, 
the full knowledge of which is held in re- 
serve; all the varied stuff, that is, of which 
genuine essays are made. 

And with him, as with Montaigne, the 
desire of self-portraiture is, below all more 
superficial tendencies, the real motive in 
writing at all— a desire closely connected 
with that intimacy, that modern subjec- 
tivity, which may be called the Montaign- 
esque element in literature. What he 
designs is to give you himself, to acquaint 
you with his likeness; but must do this, if 
at all, indirectly, being indeed always more 
or less reserved, for himself and his friends; 
friendship counting for so much in his life, 
that he is jealous of anything that might 
jar or disturb it, even to the length of a 
sort of insincerity, to which he assigns its 
quaint "praise"; this lover of stage-plays 
significantly welcoming a little touch of the 
artificiality of play to sweeten the inter- 
course of actual life. 



CHARLES LAMB 



And, in effect, a very delicate and expres- 
sive portrait of him does put itself together 
for the duly meditative reader. In indirect 
touches of his own work, scraps of faded 
old letters, what others remembered of his 
talk, the man's likeness emerges; what he 
laughed and wept at, his sudden elevations, 
and longings after absent friends, his fine 
casuistries of affection and devices to jog 
sometimes, as he says, the lazy happiness 
of perfect love, his solemn moments of 
higher discourse with the young, as they 
came across him on occasion, and went 
along a little way with him, the sudden, 
surprised apprehension of beauties in old 
literature, revealing anew the deep soul of 
poetry in things, and withal the pure spirit 
of fun, having its way again; laughter, that 
most short-lived of all things (some of 
Shakspere's even being grown hollow), 
wearing well with him. Much of all this 
comes out through his letters, which may 
be regarded as a department of his essays. 
He is an old-fashioned letter-writer, the 
essence of the old fashion of letter-writing 
lying, as with true essay-writing, in the 
dexterous availing oneself of accident and 
circumstance, in the prosecution of deeper 



CHARLES LAMB 



lines of observation; although, just as with 
the record of his conversation, one loses 
something, in losing the actual tones of the 
stammerer, still graceful in his halting, as 
he halted also in composition, composing 
slowly and by fits, "like a Flemish painter," 
as he tells us, so "it is to be regretted," 
says the editor of his letters, "that in 
the printed letters the reader will lose the 
curious varieties of writing with which the 
originals abound, and which are scrupu- 
lously adapted to the subject." 

Also, he was a true " collector," delight- 
ing in the personal finding of a thing, in 
the color an old book or print gets for him 
by the little accidents which attest previous 
ownership. Wither's Emblems, "that old 
book and quaint," long desired, when he 
finds it at last, he values none the less be- 
cause a child had colored the plates with 
his paints. A lover of household warmth 
everywhere, of that tempered atmosphere 
which our various habitations get by men's 
living within them, he " sticks to his favor- 
ite books as he did to his friends," and 
loved the "town," with a jealous eye for all 
its characteristics— "old houses" coming 
to have souls for him. The yearning for 



CHARLES LAMB 



mere warmth against him in another, 
makes him content, all through life, with 
pure brotherliness, "the most kindly and 
natural species of love," as he says, in place 
of the passion of love. Brother and sister, 
sitting thus side by side, have, of course, 
their anticipations how one of them must 
sit at last in the faint sun alone, and set us 
speculating, as we read, as to precisely 
what amount of melancholy really accom- 
panied for him the approach of old age, so 
steadily foreseen; make us note also, with 
pleasure, his successive wakings up to 
cheerful realities, out of a too curious mus- 
ing over what is gone and what remains 
of life. In his subtle capacity for enjoying 
the more refined points of earth, of human 
relationship, he could throw the gleam of 
poetry or humor on what seemed common 
or threadbare; has a care for the sighs and 
the weary, humdrum preoccupations of 
very weak people, down to their little 
pathetic "gentilities," even; while, in the 
purely human temper, he can write of 
death, almost like Shakspere. 

And that care, through all his enthusiasm 
of discovery, for what is accustomed, in 
literature, connected thus with his close 



CHARLES LAMB 



clinging to home and the earth, was con- 
gruous also with that love for the accus- 
tomed in religion, which we may notice in 
him. He is one of the last votaries of that 
old-world sentiment, based on the feelings 
of hope and awe, which may be described 
as the religion of men of letters (as Sir 
Thomas Browne has his Religion of the 
Physician)— religion as understood by the 
soberer men of letters in the last century, 
Addison, Gray, and Johnson; by Jane Aus- 
ten and Thackeray, later. A highway of 
feeling developed largely by constant inter- 
course with the great things of literature, 
and extended in its turn to those matters 
greater still, this religion lives, in the main 
retrospectively, in a system of received 
sentiments and beliefs; received, like those 
great things of literature and art, in the 
first instance, on the authority of a long 
tradition, in the course of which they have 
linked themselves in a thousand complex 
ways to the conditions of human life, and 
no more questioned now than the feeling 
one keeps by one of the greatness— say! of 
Shakspere. For Charles Lamb, such form 
of religion becomes the solemn background 
on which the nearer and more exciting ob- 



CHARLES LAMB 



jects of his immediate experience relieve 
themselves, borrowing from it an expres- 
sion of calm; its necessary atmosphere 
being indeed a profound quiet, that quiet 
which has in it a kind of sacramental effi- 
cacy, working, we might say, on the prin- 
ciple of the opus operatum, almost without 
any cooperation of one's own, towards the 
assertion of the higher self. And, in truth, 
to men of Lamb's delicately attuned tem- 
perament mere physical stillness has its full 
value; such natures seeming to long for it 
sometimes, as for no merely negative thing, 
with a sort of mystical sensuality. 

The writings of Charles Lamb are an ex- 
cellent illustration of the value of reserve 
in literature. Below his quiet, his quaint- 
ness, his humor, and what may seem the 
slightness, the occasional or accidental 
character of his work, there lies, as I said 
at starting, as in his life, a genuinely tragic 
element. The gloom, reflected at its darkest 
in those hard shadows of Rosamund Grey, 
is always there, though not always realized 
either for himself or his readers, and re- 
strained always in utterance. It gives to 
those lighter matters on the surface of life 



CHARLES LAMB 



and literature among which he for the 
most part moved, a wonderful force of ex- 
pression, as if at any moment these slight 
words and fancies might pierce very far 
into the deeper soul of things. In his writ- 
ing, as in his life, that quiet is not the low- 
flying of one from the first drowsy by choice, 
and needing the prick of some strong pas- 
sion or worldly ambition to stimulate him 
into all the energy of which he is capable; 
but rather the reaction of nature, after an 
escape from fate, dark and insane as in old 
Greek tragedy, following upon which the 
sense of mere relief becomes a kind of pas- 
sion, as with one who, having narrowly 
escaped earthquake or shipwreck, finds a 
thing for grateful tears in just sitting quiet 
at home, under the wall, till the end of 
days. 

He felt the genius of places; and I some- 
times think he resembles the places he 
knew and liked best, and where his lot fell 
—London, sixty-five years ago, with Covent 
Garden and the old theaters, and the Tem- 
ple gardens still unspoiled, Thames gliding 
down, and beyond to north and south the 
fields at Enfield or Hampton, to which, 
"with their living trees," the thoughts 



CHARLES LAMB 



wander "from the hard wood of the desk" 
—fields fresher, and coming nearer to town 
then, but in one of which the present writer 
remembers, on a brooding early summer's 
day, to have heard the cuckoo for the first 
time. Here, the surface of things is cer- 
tainly humdrum, the streets dingy, the 
green places, where the child goes a-may- 
ing, tame enough. But nowhere are things 
more apt to respond to the brighter weather, 
nowhere is there so much difference be- 
tween rain and sunshine, nowhere do the 
clouds roll together more grandly; those 
quaint suburban pastorals gathering a cer- 
tain quality of grandeur from the back- 
ground of the great city, with its weighty 
atmosphere, and portent of storm in the 
rapid light on dome and bleached stone 
steeples. 

1878. 



r 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE 



READER, in thy passage from the Bank 
—where thou hast been receiving thy 
' half-yearly dividends (supposing thou 
art a lean annuitant like myself)— to the 
Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, 
or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban 
retreat northerly— didst thou never observe 
a melancholy looking, handsome, brick and 
stone edifice, to the left, where Thread- 
needle Street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I 
dare say thou hast often admired its mag- 
nificent portals ever gaping wide, and dis- 
closing to view a grave court, with cloisters 
and pillars, with few or no traces of goers- 
in or comers-out— a desolation something 
like Balclutha's.^ 

This was once a house of trade— a center 
of busy interests. The throng of merchants 
was here— the quick pulse of gain— and here 
some forms of business are still kept up, 
though the soul be long since fled. Here 
are still to be seen stately porticos; impos- 
ing staircases, offices roomy as the state 

1 I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate. — 

OSSIAN. 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



apartments in palaces— deserted, or thinly- 
peopled with a few straggling clerks; the 
still more sacred interiors of court- and 
committee-rooms, with venerable faces of 
beadles, doorkeepers— directors seated in 
form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead 
dividend) at long worm-eaten tables, that 
have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt- 
leather coverings, supporting massy silver 
inkstands long since dry;— the oaken wain- 
scots hung with pictures of deceased gov- 
ernors and subgovernors, of Queen Anne, 
and the two first monarchs of the Bruns- 
wick dynasty;— huge charts, which subse- 
quent discoveries have antiquated;— dusty 
maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, and sound- 
ings of the Bay of Panama! The long pas- 
sages hung with buckets, appended, in idle 
row, to walls, whose substance might defy 
any, short of the last, conflagration: with 
vast ranges of cellarage under all, where 
dollars and pieces of eight once lay, an 
"unsunned heap," for Mammon to have 
solaced his solitary heart withal— long since 
dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast 
of the breaking of that famous BUBBLE.— 

Such is the SOUTH Sea House. At least 

such it was forty years ago, when I knew it 

—a magnificent relic! What alterations 

may have been made in it since, I have had 

4 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE 

no opportunities of verifying. Time, I take 
for granted, has not freshened it. No wind 
has resuscitated the face of the sleeping 
waters. A thicker crust by this time stag- 
nates upon it. The moths, that were then 
battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day- 
books, have rested from their depredations, 
but other light generations have succeeded, 
making fine fretwork among their single 
and double entries. Layers of dust have 
accumulated (a superfetation of dirt!) upon 
the old layers, that seldom used to be dis- 
turbed, save by some curious finger, now 
and then, inquisitive to explore the mode 
of bookkeeping in Queen Anne's reign; or, 
with less hallowed curiosity, seeking to 
unveil some of the mysteries of that tre- 
mendous HOAX, whose extent the petty 
peculators of our day look back upon with 
the same expression of incredulous admira- 
tion and hopeless ambition of rivalry as 
would become the puny face of modern con- 
spiracy contemplating the Titan size of 
Vaux's superhuman plot. 

Peace to the manes of the BUBBLE! 
Silence and destitution are upon thy walls, 
proud house, for a memorial. 

Situated, as thou art, in the very heart 
of stirring and living commerce— amid the 
fret and fever of speculation— with the 
5 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



Bank, and the 'Change, and the India House 
about thee, in the heyday of present pros- 
perity, with their important faces, as it 
were, insulting thee, their poor neighbor out 
of business— to the idle and merely contem- 
plative—to such as me, old house! there is 
a charm in thy quiet:— a cessation— a cool- 
ness from business— an indolence almost 
cloistral— which is delightful! With what 
reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms 
and courts at eventide! They spoke of the 
past:— the shade of some dead accountant, 
with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, 
stiff as in life. Living accounts and ac- 
countants puzzle me. I have no skill in 
figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which 
scarce three degenerate clerks of the pres- 
ent day could lift from their enshrining 
shelves— with their old fantastic flourishes 
and decorative rubric interlacings— their 
sums in triple columniations, set down with 
formal superfluity of ciphers— with pious 
sentences at the beginning, without which 
our religious ancestors never ventured to 
open a book of business, or bill of lading— 
the costly vellum covers of some of them 
almost persuading us that we are got into 
some better library— are very agreeable and 
edifying spectacles. I can look upon these 
defunct dragons with complacency. Thy 
6 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE 

heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled penknives 
(our ancestors had everything on a larger 
scale than we have hearts for) are as good 
as anything from Herculaneum. The 
pounce-boxes of our days have gone retro- 
grade. 

The very clerks which I remember in the 
South Sea House— I speak of forty years 
back— had an air very different from those 
in the public offices that I have had to do 
with since. They partook of the genius of 
the place! 

They were mostly (for the establishment 
did not admit of superfluous salaries) bache- 
lors. Generally (for they had not much to 
do) persons of a curious and speculative 
turn of mind. Old-fashioned, for a reason 
mentioned before; humorists, for they were 
of all descriptions; and, not having been 
brought together in early life (which has a 
tendency to assimilate the members of cor- 
porate bodies to each other), but, for the 
most part, placed in this house in ripe or 
middle age, they necessarily carried into it 
their separate habits and oddities, unquali- 
fied, if I may so speak, as into a common 
stock. Hence they formed a sort of Noah's 
ark. Odd fishes. A lay-monastery. Do- 
mestic retainers in a great house, kept 
more for show than use. Yet pleasant 
7 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



fellows, full of chat— and not a few among 
them had arrived at considerable proficiency 
on the German flute. 

The cashier at that time was one Evans, 
a Cambro-Briton. He had something of 
the choleric complexion of his countrymen 
stamped on his visage, but was a worthy, 
sensible man at bottom. He wore his hair, 
to the last, powdered and frizzed out, in 
the fashion which I remember to have seen 
in caricatures of what were termed, in my 
young days. Macaronies. He was the last 
of that race of beaus. Melancholy as a 
gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon, I 
think I see him making up his cash (as they 
call it) with tremulous fingers, as if he 
feared every one about him was a defaul- 
ter; in his hypochondry, ready to imagine 
himself one; haunted, at least, with the idea 
of the possibility of his becoming one: his 
tristful visage clearing up a little over his 
roast neck of veal at Anderton's at two 
(where his picture still hangs, taken a little 
before his death by desire of the master of 
the coffee-house which he had frequented 
for the last five and twenty years), but not 
attaining the meridian of its animation till 
evening brought on the hour of tea and 
visiting. The simultaneous sound of his 
well-known rap at the door with the stroke 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE 

of the clock announcing six, was a topic of 
never-failing mirth in the families which 
this dear old bachelor gladdened with his 
presence. Then was his forte, his glorified 
hour ! How would he chirp and expand over 
a muffin! How would he dilate into secret 
history! His countryman, Pennant him- 
self, in particular, could not be more elo- 
quent than he in relation to old and new 
London— the site of old theaters, churches, 
streets gone to decay— where Rosamond's 
pond stood— the Mulberry Gardens— and 
the Conduit in Cheap— with many a pleas- 
ant anecdote, derived from paternal tra- 
dition, of those grotesque figures which 
Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of 
iSToon— the worthy descendants of those 
heroic confessors, who, flying to this coun- 
try from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth 
and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of 
pure religion in the sheltering obscurities 
of Hog Lane and the vicinity of the Seven 
Dials! 

Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. 
He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. 
You would have taken him for one, had you 
met him in one of the passages leading to 
Westminster Hall. By stoop, I mean that 
gentle bending of the body forwards, which, 
in great men, must be supposed to be the 
9 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



effect of an habitual condescending atten- 
tion to the applications of their inferiors. 
While he held you in converse, you felt 
strained to the height in the colloquy. The 
conference over, you were at leisure to 
smile at the comparative insignificance of 
the pretensions which had just awed you. 
His intellect was of the shallowest order. 
It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His 
mind was in its original state of white 
paper. A sucking babe might have posed 
him. What was it then? Was he rich? 
Alas, no! Thomas Tame was very poor. 
Both he and his wife looked outwardly gen- 
tlefolks, when I fear all was not well at all 
times within. She had a neat meager per- 
son, which it was evident she had not sinned 
in over-pampering; but in its veins was 
noble blood. She traced her descent, by 
some labyrinth of relationship, which I 
never thoroughly understood,— much less 
can explain with any heraldic certainty at 
this time of day,— to the illustrious but 
unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This 
was the secret of Thomas's stoop. This 
was the thought— the sentiment— the 
bright solitary star of your lives,— ye mild 
and happy pair,— which cheered you in the 
night of intellect, and in the obscurity of 
your station! This was to you instead of 
10 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE 

riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering 
attainments: and it was worth them all 
together. You insulted none with it; but, 
while you wore it as a piece of defensive 
armor only, no insult likewise could reach 
you through it. Decus et solamen. 

Of quite another stamp was the then 
accountant, John Tipp. He neither pre- 
tended to high blood, nor in good truth 
cared one fig about the matter. He 
"thought an accountant the greatest char- 
acter in the world, and himself the greatest 
accountant in it." Yet John was not with- 
out his hobby. The fiddle relieved his va- 
cant hours. He sang, certainly, with other 
notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, 
indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. 
His fine suite of official rooms in Thread- 
needle Street, which, without anything very 
substantial appended to them, were enough 
to enlarge a man's notions of himself that 
lived in them, (I know not who is the oc- 
cupier of them now,) resounded fortnightly 
to the notes of a concert of " sweet breasts," 
as our ancestors would have called them, 
culled from club-rooms and orchestras— 
chorus singers— first and second violon- 
cellos—double basses— and clarionets— who 
ate his cold mutton and drank his punch 
and praised his ear. He sat like Lord Midas 
11 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



among them. But at the desk Tipp was 
quite another sort of creature. Thence all 
ideas that were purely ornamental were 
banished. You could not speak of anything 
romantic without rebuke. Politics were 
excluded. A newspaper was thought too 
refined and abstracted. The whole duty of 
man consisted in writing off dividend war- 
rants. The striking of the annual balance 
in the company's books (which, perhaps, 
differed from the balance of last year in the 
sum of 251. Is. 6d.) occupied his days and 
nights for a month previous. Not that 
Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as 
they called them in the city) in his beloved 
house, or did not sigh for a return of the 
old stirring days when South Sea hopes 
were young— (he was indeed equal to the 
wielding of any the most intricate accounts 
of the most flourishing company in these 
or those days):— but to a genuine account- 
ant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. 
The fractional farthing is as dear to his 
heart as the thousands which stand before 
it. He is the true actor, who, whether his 
part be a prince or a peasant, must act it 
with like intensity. With Tipp form was 
everything. His life was formal. His ac- 
tions seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen 
was not less erring than his heart. He 
12 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE 

made the best executor in the world: he was 
plagued with incessant executorships ac- 
cordingly, which excited his spleen and 
soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He 
would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little 
orphans, whose rights he would guard with 
a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand 
that commended their interests to his pro- 
tection. With all this there was about him 
a sort of timidity— (his few enemies used to 
give it a worse name)— a something which, 
in reverence to the dead, we will place, if 
you please, a little on this side of the heroic. 
Nature certainly had been pleased to endow 
John Tipp with a sufficient measure of the 
principle of self-preservation. There is a 
cowardice which we do not despise, because 
it has nothing base or treacherous in its 
elements; it betrays itself, not you: it is 
mere temperament; the absence of the ro- 
mantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion 
in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, 
"greatly find quarrel in a straw," when 
some supposed honor is at stake. Tipp 
never mounted the box of a stage-coach in 
his life; or leaned against the rails of a bal- 
cony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; 
or looked down a precipice; or let off a gun; 
or went upon a water-party; or would will- 
ingly let you go if he could have helped it: 
13 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



neither was it recorded of him, that for 
lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook 
friend or principle. 

Whom next shall we summon from the 
dusty dead, in whom common qualities be- 
come uncommon ? Can I forget thee, Henry 
Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, 
the author, of the South Sea House? who 
never enteredst thy office in a morning or 
quittedst it in midday— (what didst thou in 
an office?)— without some quirk that left a 
sting! Thy gibes and thy jokes are now 
extinct, or survive but in two forgotten 
volumes, which I had the good fortune to 
rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three 
days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, epi- 
grammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little 
gone by in these fastidious days— thy topics 
are staled by the " new-born gauds " of the 
time:— but great thou used to be in Public 
Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, 
and Shelburne, and Rockingham, and Howe, 
and Burgoyne, and Clinton, and the war 
which ended in the tearing from Great 
Britain her rebellious colonies,— and Kep- 
pel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, 
and Dunning, and Pratt, and Richmond— 
and such small politics.— 

A little less facetious, and a great deal 
more obstreperous, was fine rattling, rattle- 
14 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE 

headed Plumer. He was descended— not in 
a right line, reader (for his hneal preten- 
sions, like his personal, favored a little of 
the sinister bend)— from the Plumers of 
Hertfordshire. So tradition gave him out; 
and certain family features not a little 
sanctioned the opinion. Certainly old Wal- 
ter Plumer (his reputed author) had been 
a rake in his days, and visited much in 
Italy, and had seen the world. He was 
uncle, bachelor uncle, to the fine old Whig 
still living, who has represented the county 
in so many successive parliaments, and 
has a fine old mansion near Ware. Walter 
flourished in George the Second's days, and 
was the same who was summoned before 
the House of Commons about a business of 
franks, with the old Duchess of Marlbor- 
ough. You may read of it in Johnson's life 
of Cave. Cave came off cleverly in that 
business. It is certain our Plumer did no- 
thing to discountenance the rumor. He 
rather seemed pleased whenever it was, 
with all gentleness, insinuated. But besides 
his family pretensions, Plumer was an en- 
gaging fellow, and sang gloriously.— 

Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sang- 

est, mild, childlike, pastoral M ; a flute's 

breathing less divinely whispering than thy 

Arcadian melodies, when, in tones worthy 

15 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



of Arden, thou didst chant that song sung 
by Amiens to the banished duke, which pro- 
claims the winter wind more lenient than 
for a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old 
surly M , the unapproachable church- 
warden of Bishopsgate. He knew not 
what he did, when he begat thee, like 
spring, gentle offspring of blustering win- 
ter:— only unfortunate in thy ending, which 
should have been mild, conciliatory, swan- 
like. - 

Much remains to sing. Many fantastic 
shapes rise up, but they must be mine in 
private:— already I have fooled the reader 
to the top of his bent;— else could I omit 
that strange creature Woollett, who existed 
in trying the question, and bought liti- 
gations ?— and still stranger, inimitable, 
solemn Hepworth, from whose gravity 
Newton might have deduced the law of 
gravitation. How profoundly would he nib 
a pen— with what deliberation would he 
wet a wafer!— 

But it is time to close— night's wheels 
are rattling fast over me— it is proper to 
have done with this solemn mockery. 

Reader, what if I have been playing with 

thee all this while— peradventure the very 

nameSf which I have summoned up before 

thee, are fantastic— insubstantial— like 

16 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE 

Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of 
Greece:— 

Be satisfied that something answering to 
them has had a being. Their importance is 
from the past. 



17 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 



CASTING a preparatory glance at the 
bottom of this article— as the wary- 
connoisseur in prints, with cursory- 
eye (which, while it reads, seems as though 
it read not), never fails to consult the quis 
sculpsit in the corner, before he pronounces 
some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Wool- 
let— methinks I hear you exclaim. Reader, 
Who is Elia ? 

Because in my last I tried to divert thee 
with some half-forgotten humors of some 
old clerks defunct, in an old house of busi- 
ness, long since gone to decay, doubtless 
you have already set me down in your mind 
as one of the selfsame college— a votary of 
the desk — a notched and cropt scrivener — 
one that sucks his sustenance, as certain 
sick people are said to do, through a quill. 

Well, I do agnize something of this sort. 
I confess that it is my humor, my fancy— 
in the fore part of the day, when the mind 
of your man of letters requires some relaxa- 
tion— (and none better than such as at first 
sight seems most abhorrent from his be- 
18 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 

loved studies)— to while away some good 
hours of my time in the contemiplation of 
indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, 
flowered or otherwise. In the first place 
* * * * * and then it sends 
you home with such increased appetite to 
your books ****** 
not to say, that your outside sheets, and 
waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into 
them, most kindly and naturally, the im- 
pression of sonnets, epigrams, essays— so 
that the very parings of a counting-house 
are, in some sort, the settings up of an 
author. The enfranchised quill, that has 
plodded all the morning among the cart- 
rucks of figures and ciphers, frisks and 
curvets so at its ease over the flowery car- 
pet-ground of a midnight dissertation.— It 
feels its promotion. * * * * * 
So that you see, upon the whole, the literary 
dignity of Elia is very little, if at all, com- 
promised in the condescension. 

Not that, in my anxious detail of the many 
commodities incidental to the life of a public 
office, I would be thought blind to certain 
flaws, which a cunning carper might be able 
to pick in this Joseph's vest. And here I 
must have leave, in the fullness of my soul, 
to regret the abolition, and doing-away-with 
altogether, of those consolatory interstices, 
19 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



and sprinklings of freedom, through the 
four seasons,— the red-letter days, now be- 
come, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter 
days. There was Paul, and Stephen, and 
Barnabas— 

Andrew and John, men famous in old times 

—we were used to keep all their days holy, 
as long back as I was at school at Christ's. 
I remember their effigies, by the same token, 
in the old Basket Prayer Book. There hung 
Peter in his uneasy posture— holy Bartlemy 
in the troublesome act of flaying, after the 
famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti.— I honored 
them all, and could almost have wept the 
defalcation of Iscariot— so much did we love 
to keep holy memories sacred: — only me- 
thought I a little grudged at the coalition 
of the better Jude with Simon— clubbing (as 
it were) their sanctities together, to make 
up one poor gaudy-day between them— as 
an economy unworthy of the dispensation. 
These were bright visitations in a schol- 
ar's and a clerk's life— "far off their coming 
shone."— I was as good as an almanac in 
those days. I could have told you such a 
saint's day falls out next week, or the week 
after. Peradventure the Epiphany, by some 
periodical infelicity, would, once in six years, 
20 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 

merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better 
than one of the profane. Let me not be 
thought to arraign the wisdom of my civil 
superiors, who have judged the further ob- 
servation of these holy tides to be papistical, 
superstitious. Only in a custom of such 
long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses 
the Bishops had, in decency, been first 
sounded— but I am wading out of my 
depths. I am not the man to decide the 
limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority— 
I am plain Elia— no Selden, nor Archbishop 
Usher — though at present in the thick of 
their books, here in the heart of learning, 
under the shadow of the mighty Bodley. 

I can here play the gentleman, enact the 
student. To such a one as myself, who has 
been defrauded in his young years of the 
sweet food of academic institution, nowhere 
is so pleasant, to while away a few idle 
weeks at, as one or other of the Universities. 
Their vacation, too, at this time of the year, 
falls in so pat with ours. Here I can take 
my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of 
what degree or standing I please. I seem 
admitted ad eundem. I fetch up past op- 
portunities. I can rise at the chapel bell, 
and dream that it rings for me. In moods 
of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. 
When the peacock vein rises, I strut a Gen- 
21 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



tleman Commoner. In graver moments, I 
proceed Master of Arts. Indeed I do not 
think I am much unlike that respectable 
character. I have seen your dim-eyed ver- 
gers, and bed-makers in spectacles, drop a 
bow or a curtsy, as I pass, wisely mistaking 
me for something of the sort. I go about 
in black, which favors the notion. Only in 
Christ Church reverend quadrangle I can 
be content to pass for nothing short of a 
Seraphic Doctor. 

The walks at these times are so much 
one's own,— the tall trees of Christ's, the 
groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, 
and with open doors, inviting one to slip in 
unperceived, and pay a devoir to some 
Founder, or noble or royal Benefactress 
(that should have been ours) whose portrait 
seems to smile upon their overlooked 
beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. 
Then, to take a peep in by the way at the 
butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique 
hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, 
kitchen fireplaces, cordial recesses; ovens 
whose first pies were baked four centuries 
ago; and spits which have cooked for Chau- 
cer! Not the meanest minister among the 
dishes but is hallowed to me through his 
imagination, and the Cook goes forth a 
Manciple. 

22 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what 
art thou? that, being nothing, art every- 
thing! When thou wert, thou wert not an- 
tiquity—then thou wert nothing, but hadst 
a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to 
look back to with bhnd veneration; thou 
thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! 
What mystery lurks in this retroversion? 
or what half Januses ^ are we, that cannot 
look forward with the same idolatry with 
which we forever revert! The mighty 
future is as nothing, being everything! the 
past is everything, being nothing! 

What were thy dark ages ? Surely the 
sun rose as brightly then as now, and man 
got him to his work in the morning? Why 
is it we can never hear mention of them 
without an accompanying feeling, as though 
a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of 
things, and that our ancestors wandered to 
and fro groping! 

Above all thy rarities, old Oxenf ord, what 
do most arride and solace me, are thy 
repositories of moldering learning, thy 
shelves— 

What a place to be in is an old library! 
It seems as though all the souls of all the 
writers, that have bequeathed their labors 
to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as 

1 Januses of one face.— Sib Thomas Browne. 

23 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



in some dormitory, or middle state. I do 
not want to handle, to profane the leaves, 
their winding-sheets. I could as soon dis- 
lodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, 
walking amid their foliage; and the odor of 
their old moth-scented coverings is fra- 
grant as the first hloom of those sciential 
apples which grew amid the happy orchard. 

Still less have I curiosity to disturb the 
elder repose of MSS. Those varice lectiones, 
so tempting to the more erudite palates, do 
but disturb and unsettle my faith. I am no 
Herculanean raker. The credit of the three 
witnesses might have slept unimpeached 
for me. I leave these curiosities to Porson, 
and to G. D.— whom, by the way, I found 
busy as a moth over some rotten archive, 
rummaged out of some seldom-explored 
press, in a nook at Oriel. With long poring, 
he is grown almost into a book. He stood 
as passive as one by the side of the old 
shelves. I longed to new-coat him in russia, 
and assign him his place. He might have 
mustered for a tall Scapula. 

D. is assiduous in his visits to these seats 
of learning. No inconsiderable portion of 
his moderate fortune, I apprehend, is con- 
sumed in journeys between them and Clif- 
ford's Inn— where, like a dove on the asp's 
nest, he has long taken up his unconscious 
24 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 

abode, amid an incongruous assembly of at- 
torneys, attorneys' clerks, apparitors, pro- 
moters, vermin of the law, among whom he 
sits, "in calm and sinless peace." The 
fangs of the law pierce him not— the winds 
of litigation blow over his humble cham- 
bers—the hard sheriff's officer moves his 
hat as he passes— legal nor illegal discour- 
tesy touches him— none thinks of offering 
violence or injustice to him— you would as 
soon " strike an abstract idea." 

D. has been engaged, he tells me, through 
a course of laborious years, in an investiga- 
tion into all curious matter connected with 
the two Universities; and has lately lit upon 

a MS. collection of charters, relative to C , 

by which he hopes to settle some disputed 
points— particularly that long controversy 
between them as to priority of foundation. 
The ardor with which he engages in these 
liberal pursuits, I am afraid, has not met 
with all the encouragement it deserved, 

either here or at C . Your caputs, and 

heads of colleges, care less than anybody 
else about these questions.— Contented to 
suck the milky fountains of their Alma 
Maters, without inquiring into the venerable 
gentlewoman's years, they rather hold such 
curiosities to be impertinent— unreverend. 
They have their good glebe-lands in manu, 
25 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



and care not much to rake into the title- 
deeds. I gather at least so much from other 
sources, for D. is not a man to complain. 

D. started like an unbroken heifer, when 
I interrupted him. A priori it was not very 
probable that we should have met in Oriel. 
But D. would have done the same, had I 
accosted him on the sudden in his own 
walks in Clifford's Inn, or in the Temple. 
In addition to a provoking short-sighted- 
ness (the effect of late studies and watch- 
ings at the midnight oil) D. is the most 
absent of men. He made a call the other 
morning at our friend M.'s in Bedford 
Square; and, finding nobody at home, was 
ushered into the hall, where, asking for pen 
and ink, with great exactitude of purpose he 
enters me his name in the book— which 
ordinarily lies about in such places, to re- 
cord the failures of the untimely or unfor- 
tunate visitor— and takes his leave with 
many ceremonies, and professions of regret. 
Some two or three hours after, his walking 
destinies returned him into the same neigh- 
borhood again, and again the quiet image of 
the fireside circle at M.'s— Mrs. M. presiding 
at it like a Queen Lar, with pretty A. S. at 
her side— striking irresistibly on his fancy, 
he makes another call (forgetting that they 
were "certainly not to return from the 
26 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 

country before that day week ")? and disap- 
pointed a second time, inquires for pen and 
paper as before: again the book is brought, 
and in the line just above that in which he 
is about to print his second name (his re- 
script)— his first name (scarce dry) looks 
out upon him like another Sosia, or as if a 
man should suddenly encounter his own 
duplicate!— The effect may be conceived. 
D. made many a good resolution against any 
such lapses in future. I hope he will not 
keep them too rigorously. 

For with G. D.— to be absent from the 
body, is sometimes (not to speak it pro- 
fanely) to be present with the Lord. At 
the very time when, personally encounter- 
ing thee, he passes on with no recognition 
—or, being stopped, starts like a thing sur- 
prised—at that moment. Reader, he is on 
Mount Tabor— or Parnassus— or co-sphered 
with Plato— or, with Harrington, framing 
" immortal commonwealths " — devising 
some plan of amelioration to thy country, 
or thy species— perad venture meditating 
some individual kindness or courtesy, to be 
done to thee thyself, the returning con- 
sciousness of which made him to start so 
guiltily at thy obtruded personal presence. 

D. is delightful anywhere, but he is at the 
best in such places as these. He cares not 
27 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



much for Bath. He is out of his element 
at Buxton, at Scarborough, or Harrowgate. 
The Cam and the Isis are to him "better 
than all the waters of Damascus." On the 
Muses' hill he is happy, and good, as one of 
the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains; 
and when he goes about with you to show 
you the halls and colleges, you think you 
have with you the Interpreter at the House 
Beautiful. 



28 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 
FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO 



rl Mr. Lamb's " Works," published a year 
or two since, I find a magnificent eulogy 
on my old school,^ such as it was, or now 
appears to him to have been, between the 
years 1782 and 1789. It happens, very oddly, 
that my own standing at Christ's was nearly 
corresponding with his; and with all grati- 
tude to him for his enthusiasm for the 
cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring 
together whatever can be said in praise of 
them, dropping all the other side of the 
argument most ingeniously. 

I remember L. at school; and can well 
recollect that he had some peculiar advan- 
tages, which I and others of his school-fel- 
lows had not. His friends lived in town, 
and were near at hand; and he had the 
privilege of going to see them, almost as 
often as he wished, through some invidious 
distinction, which was denied to us. The 
present worthy subtreasurer to the Inner 
Temple can explain how that happened. 
He had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, 

1 Recollections of Christ's Hospital. 

29 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



while we were battening upon our quarter 
of a penny loaf —our crw^r— moistened with 
attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, 
smacking of the pitched leathern jack it 
was poured from. Our Monday's milk por- 
ridge, blue and tasteless, and the pease soup 
of Saturday, coarse and choking, were en- 
riched for him with a slice of "extraordi- 
nary bread and butter," from the hot-loaf 
of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of 
millet, somewhat less repugnant (we had 
three banian to four meat days in the 
week), was endeared to his palate with a 
lump of double-refined, and a smack of 
ginger (to make it go down the more glibly) 
or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our 
half-pickled Sundays, or quite fresh boiled 
beef on Thursdays (strong as caro equina), 
with detestable marigolds floating in the 
pail to poison the broth— our scanty mutton 
scrags on Fridays— and rather more savory, 
but grudging, portions of the same flesh, 
rotten-roasted or rare, on the Tuesdays (the 
only dish which excited our appetites, and 
disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal 
proportion)— he had his hot plate of roast 
veal, or the more tempting griskin (exotics 
unknown to our palates), cooked in the 
paternal kitchen (a great thing), and 
brought him daily by his maid or aunt! I 
30 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 



remember the good old relative (in whom 
love forbade pride) squatting down upon 
some odd stone in a by-nook of the cloisters, 
disclosing the viands (of higher regale than 
those cates which the ravens ministered to 
the Tishbite); and the contending passions 
of L. at the unfolding. There was love for 
the bringer; shame for the thing brought, 
and the manner of its bringing; sympathy 
for those who were too many to share in it; 
and, at top of all, hunger (eldest, strongest 
of the passions!) predominant, breaking 
down the stony fences of shame, and awk- 
wardness, and a troubling over-conscious- 
ness. 

I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, 
and those who should care for me, were far 
away. Those few acquaintances of theirs 
which they could reckon upon as being kind 
to me in the great city, after a little forced 
notice, which they had the grace to take of 
me on my first arrival in town, soon grew 
tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to 
them to recur too often, though I thought 
them few enough; and, one after another, 
they all failed me, and I felt myself alone 
among six hundred playmates. 

the cruelty of separating a poor lad 
from his early homestead! The yearnings 
which I used to have towards it in those 
31 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



unfledged years! How, in my dreams, 
would my native town (far in the west) 
come back, with its church, and trees, and 
faces! How I would wake weeping, and in 
the anguish of my heart exclaim upon 
sweet Calne in Wiltshire! 

To this late hour of my life, I trace im- 
pressions left by the recollection of those 
friendless holidays. The long warm days 
of summer never return but they bring 
with them a gloom from the haunting 
memory of those whole-day leaves, when, 
by some strange arrangement, we were 
turned out, for the livelong day, upon our 
own hands, whether we had friends to go 
to, or none. I remember those bathing- 
excursions to the New River, which L. re- 
calls with such relish, better, I think, than 
he can— for he was a home-seeking lad, and 
did not much care for such water-pastimes. 
—How merrily we would sally forth into the 
fields; and strip under the first warmth of 
the sun; and wanton like young dace in the 
streams; getting us appetites for noon, 
which those of us that were penniless (our 
scanty morning crust long since exhausted) 
had not the means of allaying— while the 
cattle, and the birds, and the fishes, were at 
feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy 
our cravings— the very beauty of the day, 
32 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 



and the exercise of the pastime, and the 
sense of liberty, setting a keener edge upon 
them!— How faint and languid, finally, we 
would return, towards nightfall, to our 
desired morsel, half rejoicing, half reluc- 
tant, that the hours of our uneasy liberty 
had expired ! 

It was worse in the days of winter, to go 
prowling about the streets objectless— 
shivering at cold windows of print-shops, 
to extract a little amusement; or haply, as 
a last resort, in the hopes of a little novelty, 
to pay a fifty-times-repeated visit (where 
our individual faces should be as well known 
to the warden as those of his own charges) 
to the Lions in the Tower— to whose levee, 
by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescrip- 
tive title to admission. 

L.'s governor (so we called the patron 
who presented us to the foundation) lived 
in a manner under his paternal roof. Any 
complaint which he had to make was sure 
of being attended to. This was understood 
at Christ's, and was an effectual screen to 
him against the severity of masters, or 
worse tyranny of the monitors. The op- 
pressions of these young brutes are heart- 
sickening to call to recollection. I have 
been called out of my bed, and waked for 
the purpose, in the coldest winter nights— 
2 33 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



and this not once, but night after night— in 
my shirt, to receive the discipline of a lea- 
thern thong, with eleven other sufferers, be- 
cause it pleased my callow overseer, when 
there has been any talking heard after we 
were gone to bed, to make the six last beds 
in the dormitory, where the youngest chil- 
dren of us slept, answerable for an offense 
they neither dared to commit, nor had the 
power to hinder.— The same execrable tyr- 
anny drove the younger part of us from 
the fires, when our feet were perishing with 
snow; and, under the cruelest penalties, 
forbade the indulgence of a drink of water, 
when we lay in sleepless summer nights, 
fevered with the season and the day's 
sports. 

There was one H , who, I learned in 

after days, was seen expiating some ma- 
turer offense in the hulks. (Do I flatter 
myself in fancying that this might be the 
planter of that name, who suffered— at 
Nevis, I think, or St. Kitts— some few 
years since? My friend Tobin was the 
benevolent instrument of bringing him to 
the gallows.) This petty Nero actually 
branded a boy, who had offended him, with 
a red-hot iron; and nearly starved forty of 
us, with exacting contributions, to the one 
half of our bread, to pamper a young ass, 
34 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 



which, incredible as it may seem, with the 
connivance of the nurse's daughter (a young 
flame of his), he had contrived to smuggle 
in, and keep upon the leads of the ward, as 
they called our dormitories. This game 
went on for better than a week, till the 
foolish beast, not able to fare well but he 
must cry roast meat — happier than Calig- 
ula's minion, could he have kept his own 
counsel— but, foolisher, alas! than any of 
his species in the fables— waxing fat, and 
kicking, in the fullness of bread, one un- 
lucky minute would needs proclaim his good 
fortune to the world below; and, laying out 
his simple throat, blew such a ram's-horn 
blast, as (toppling down the walls of his 
own Jericho) set concealment any longer 
at defiance. The client was dismissed, with 
certain attentions, to Smithfield; but I never 
understood that the patron underwent any 
censure on the occasion. This was in the 
stewardship of L.'s admired Perry. 

Under the same faeile administration, can 
L. have forgotten the cool impunity with 
which the nurses used to carry away openly, 
in open platters, for their own tables, one 
out of two of every hot joint, which the 
careful matron had been seeing scrupulously 
weighed out for our dinners? These things 
were daily practised in that magnificent 
35 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



apartment, which L. (grown connoisseur 
since, we presume) praises so highly for 
the grand paintings " by Verrio and others," 
with which it is " hung round and adorned." 
But the sight of sleek well-fed blue-coat 
boys in pictures was, at that time, I believe, 
little consolatory to him, or us, the living 
ones, who saw the better part of our pro- 
visions carried away before our faces by 
harpies; and ourselves reduced (with the 
Trojan in the hall of Dido) 

To feed our mind with idle portraiture. 

L. has recorded the repugnance of the 
school to gags, or the fat of fresh beef 
boiled; and sets it down to some supersti- 
tion. But these unctuous morsels are never 
grateful to young palates (children are uni- 
versally fat-haters), and in strong, coarse, 
boiled meats, unsalted, are detestable. A 
gag-eater in our time was equivalent to a 

ghoul, and held in equal detestation. 

suffered under the imputation: 

. . . 'T was said 
He ate strange flesh. 

He was observed, after dinner, carefully 
to gather up the remnants left at his table 
(not many, nor very choice fragments, you 
36 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 



may credit me) —and, in an especial manner, 
these disreputable morsels, which he would 
convey away, and secretly stow in the settle 
that stood at his bedside. None saw when 
he ate them. It was rumored that he pri- 
vately devoured them in the night. He 
was watched, but no traces of such midnight 
practices were discoverable. Some reported 
that, on leave-days, he had been seen to 
carry out of the bounds a large blue check 
handkerchief full of something. This then 
must be the accursed thing. Conjecture 
next was at work to imagine how he could 
dispose of it. Some said he sold it to the 
beggars. This belief generally prevailed. 
He went about moping. None spake to 
him. No one would play with him. He 
was excommunicated; put out of the pale 
of the school. He was too powerful a boy 
to be beaten, but he underwent every mode 
of that negative punishment which is more 
grievous than many stripes. Still he per- 
severed. At length he was observed by two 
of his school-fellows, who were determined 
to get at the secret, and had traced him one 
leave-day for that purpose, to enter a large 
worn-out building, such as there exist 
specimens of in Chancery Lane, which are 
let out to various scales of pauperism, with 
open door and a common staircase. After 
37 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



him they silently slunk in, and followed by 
stealth up four flights, and saw him tap at 
a poor wicket, which was opened by an aged 
woman, meanly clad. Suspicion was now 
ripened into certainty. The informers had 
secured their victim. They had him in 
their toils. Accusation was formally pre- 
ferred, and retribution most signal was 
looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the then steward 
(for this happened a little after my time), 
with that patient sagacity which tempered 
all his conduct, determined to investigate 
the matter, before he proceeded to sentence. 
The result was, that the supposed mendi- 
cants, the receivers or purchasers of the 
mysterious scraps, turned out to be the 

parents of , an honest couple come to 

decay,— whom this seasonable supply had, 
in all probability, saved from mendicancy: 
and that this young stork, at the expense 
of his own good name, had all this while 
been only feeding the old birds!— The gov- 
ernors on this occasion, much to their 
honor, voted a present relief to the family 

of , and presented him with a silver 

medal. The lesson which the steward read 
upon RASH JUDGMENT, on the occasion of 
publicly delivering the medal to , I be- 
lieve, would not be lost upon his auditory. 
—I had left school then, but I well remem- 
38 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 



ber . He was a tall, shambling youth, 

with a cast in his eye, not at all calculated 
to conciliate hostile prejudices. I have 
since seen him carrying a baker's basket. 
I think I heard he did not do quite so well 
by himself as he had done by the old folks. 
I was a hypochondriac lad; and the sight 
of a boy in fetters, upon the day of my first 
putting on the blue clothes, was not exactly 
fitted to assuage the natural terrors of 
initiation. I was of tender years, barely 
turned of seven; and had only read of such 
things in books, or seen them but in dreams. 
I was told he had run away. This was the 
punishment for the first offense.— As a nov- 
ice I was soon after taken to see the dun- 
geons. These were little, square. Bedlam 
cells, where a boy could just lie at his length 
upon straw and a blanket— a mattress, I 
think, was afterwards substituted— with a 
peep of light, let in askance, from a prison 
orifice at top, barely enough to read by. 
Here the poor boy was locked in by himself 
all day, without sight of any but the porter 
who brought him his bread and water— 
who might not speak to him;— or of the 
beadle, who came twice a week to call him 
out to receive his periodical chastisement, 
which was almost welcome, because it 
separated him for a brief interval from 
39 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



solitude:— and here he was shut up by him- 
self of nights, out of the reach of any sound, 
to suffer whatever horrors the weak nerves, 
and superstition incident to his time of life, 
might subject him to.^ This was the pen- 
alty for the second offense. Wouldst thou 
like. Reader, to see what became of him in 
the next degree? 

The culprit, who had been a third time an 
offender, and whose expulsion was at this 
time deemed irreversible, was brought forth, 
as at some solemn auto da fe, arrayed in 
uncouth and most appalling attire, all trace 
of his late "watchet weeds" carefully 
effaced; he was exposed in a jacket, re- 
sembling those which London lamplighters 
formerly delighted in, with a cap of the 
same. The effect of this divestiture was 
such as the ingenious devisers of it could 
have anticipated. With his pale and 
frighted features, it was as if some of those 
disfigurements in Dante had seized upon 
him. In this disguisement he was brought 
into the hall {L.^s favorite state-room), 
where awaited him the whole number of 

1 One or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide, ac- 
cordingly, at length convinced the governors of the impolicy 
of this part of the sentence, and the midnight torture to the 
spirits was dispensed with. — This fancy of dungeons for chil- 
dren was a sprout of Howard's brain ; for which (saving the 
reverence due to Holy Paul) methinks I could willingly spit 
upon his statue. 

40 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 



his school-fellows, whose joint lessons and 
sports he was thenceforth to share no 
more; the awful presence of the steward, 
to be seen for the last time; of the execu- 
tioner beadle, clad in his state robe for the 
occasion; and of two faces more, of direr 
import, because never but in these extrem- 
ities visible. These were governors; two 
of whom, by choice, or charter, were always 
accustomed to officiate at these Ultima 
Supplicia; not to mitigate (so at least we 
understood it), but to enforce the uttermost 
stripe. Old Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter 
Aubert, I remember, were colleagues on one 
occasion, when the beadle turning rather 
pale, a glass of brandy was ordered to pre- 
pare him for the mysteries. The scourging 
was, after the old Roman fashion, long and 
stately. The lictor accompanied the crimi- 
nal quite round the hall. We were generally 
too faint with attending to the previous 
disgusting circumstances to make accurate 
report with our eyes of the degree of cor- 
poral suffering inflicted. Report, of course, 
gave out the back knotty and livid. After 
scourging, he was made over, in his San 
Benito, to his friends, if he had any (but 
commonly such poor runagates were friend- 
less), or to his parish officer, who, to en- 
hance the effect of the scene, had his station 
41 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



allotted to him on the outside of the hall 
gate. 

These solemn pageantries were not played 
off so often as to spoil the general mirth of 
the community. We had plenty of exercise 
and recreation after school hours; and, for 
myself, I must confess that I was never 
happier than in them. The Upper and the 
Lower Grammar Schools were held in the 
same room; and an imaginary line only 
divided their bounds. Their character was 
as different as that of the inhabitants on 
the two sides of the Pyrenees. The Rev. 
James Boyer was the Upper Master, but 
the Rev. Matthew Field presided over that 
portion of the apartment of which I had 
the good fortune to be a member. We lived 
a life as careless as birds. We talked and 
did just what we pleased, and nobody mo- 
lested us. We carried an accidence, or a 
grammar, for form; but, for any trouble it 
gave us, we might take two years in getting 
through the verbs deponent, and another 
two in forgetting all that we had learned 
about them. There was now and then the 
formality of saying a lesson, but if you had 
not learned it, a brush across the shoulders 
(just enough to disturb a fly) was the sole 
remonstrance. Field never used the rod; 
and in truth he wielded the cane with no 
42 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 



great good will— holding it "like a dancer." 
It looked in his hands rather like an emblem 
than an instrument of authority; and an 
emblem, too, he was ashamed of. He was 
a good easy man, that did not care to ruffle 
his own peace, nor perhaps set any great 
consideration upon the value of juvenile 
time. He came among us, now and then, 
but often stayed away whole days from us; 
and when he came, it made no difference 
to us— he had his private room to retire to, 
the short time he stayed, to be out of the 
sound of our noise. Our mirth and uproar 
went on. We had classics of our own, with- 
out being beholden to "insolent Greece or 
haughty Rome," that passed current among 
us— Peter Wilkins— The Adventures of the 
Hon. Captain Robert Boyle— the Fortunate 
Blue-coat Boy— and the like. Or we culti- 
vated a turn for mechanic and scientific 
operations; making little sun-dials of paper; 
or weaving those ingenious parentheses, 
called cat-cradles; or making dry peas to 
dance upon the end of a tin pipe; or study- 
ing the art military over that laudable game 
" French and English," and a hundred other 
such devices to pass away the time— mixing 
the useful with the agreeable— as would 
have made the souls of Rousseau and John 
Locke chuckle to have seen us. 
43 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



Matthew Field belonged to that class of 
modest divines who affect to mix in equal 
proportion the gentleman, the scholar, and 
the Christian; hut, I know not how, the 
first ingredient is generally found to he the 
predominating dose in the composition. 
He was engaged in gay parties, or with his 
courtly how at some episcopal levee, when 
he should have been attending upon us. 
He had for many years the classical charge 
of a hundred children, during the four or 
five first years of their education; and his 
very highest form seldoni proceeded further 
than two or three of the introductory fables 
of Pheedrus. How things were suffered to 
go on thus, I cannot guess. Boyer, who 
was the proper person to have remedied 
these abuses, always affected, perhaps felt, 
a delicacy in interfering in a province not 
strictly his own. I have not been without 
my suspicions, that he was not altogether 
displeased at the contrast we presented to 
his end of the school. We were a sort of 
Helots to his young Spartans. He would 
sometimes, with ironic deference, send to 
borrow a rod of the Under Master, and then, 
with Sardonic grin, observe to one of his 
upper boys, " how neat and fresh the twigs 
looked." While his pale students were bat- 
tering their brains over Xenophon and 
44 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 



Plato, with a silence as deep as that en- 
joined by the Samite, we were enjoying our- 
selves at our ease in our little Goshen. We 
saw a little into the secrets of his discipline, 
and the prospect did but the more reconcile 
us to our lot. His thunders rolled innoc- 
uous for us; his storms came near, but 
never touched us; contrary to Gideon's 
miracle, while all around were drenched, 
our fleece was dry.^ His boys turned out 
the better scholars; we, I suspect, have the 
advantage in temper. His pupils cannot 
speak of him without something of terror 
allaying their gratitude; the remembrance 
of Field comes back with all the soothing 
images of indolence, and summer slumbers, 
and work like play, and innocent idleness, 
and Elysian exemptions, and life itself a 
"playing holiday." 

Though sufficiently removed from the 
jurisdiction of Boyer, we were near enough 
(as I have said) to understand a little of his 
system. We occasionally heard sounds of 
the Ululantes, and caught glances of Tar- 
tarus. B. was a rabid pedant. His English 
style was crampt to barbarism. His Easter 
anthems (for his duty obliged him to those 
periodical flights) were grating as scrannel 



Cowley. 

45 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



pipes.-^— He would laugh— aye, and heartily 
—but then it must be at Flaccus's quibble 
about Rex— or at the tristis severitas in 
vultUf or inspieere in patinas, of Terence- 
thin jests, which at their first broaching 
could hardly have had vis enough to move 
a Roman muscle.— He had two wigs, both 
pedantic, but of different omen. The one 
serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening 
a mild day. The other, an old discolored, 
unkempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent 
and bloody execution. Woe to the school 
when he made his morning appearance in 
his passy, or passionate wig. No comet ex- 
pounded surer.— J. B. had a heavy hand. 
I have known him double his knotty fist at 
a poor trembling child (the maternal milk 
hardly dry upon its lips) with a " Sirrah, do 
you presume to set your wits at me?"— 
Nothing was more common than to see him 
make a headlong entry into the school-room, 
from his inner recess, or library, and, with 
turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, 

1 In this and everything B. was the antipodes of his coad- 
jutor. While the former was digging his brains for crude 
anthems, worth a pignut, F. would be recreating his gentle- 
manly fancy in the more flowery walks of the Muses. A little 
dramatic effusion of his, under the name of Vertumnus and 
Pomona, is not yet forgotten by the chroniclers of that sort 
of literature. It was accepted by Garrick, but the town did 
not give it their sanction.— B. used to say of it, in a way of 
half compliment, half irony, that it was too classical for repre- 
sentation. 

46 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 



"Od's my life, sirrah" (his favorite adjura- 
tion), " I have a great mind to whip you,"— 
then, with as sudden a retracting impulse, 
fling back into his lair— and, after a cooling 
lapse of some minutes (during which all but 
the culprit had totally forgotten the con- 
text), drive headlong out again, piecing out 
his imperfect sense, as if it had been some 
Devil's Litany, with the expletory yell— 
^'and I WILL f 00."— In his gentler moods, 
when the rdhidus furor was assuaged, he 
had resort to an ingenious method, peculiar, 
for what I have heard, to himself, of whip- 
ping the boy, and reading the Debates, at 
the same time; a paragraph and a lash be- 
tween; which in those times, when parlia- 
mentary oratory was most at a height and 
flourishing in these realms, was not calcu- 
lated to impress the patient with a venera- 
tion for the diffuser graces of rhetoric. 

Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was 
known to fall ineffectual from his hand- 
when droll squinting W having been 

caught putting the inside of the master's 
desk to a use for which the architect had 
clearly not designed it, to justify himself, 
with great simplicity averred, that he did 
not know that the thing had been forewarned. 
This exquisite irrecognition of any law ante- 
cedent to the oral or declaratory, struck so 
47 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



irresistibly upon the fancy of all^who heard 
it (the pedagogue himself not excepted) that 
remission was unavoidable. 

L. has given credit to B.'s great merits as 
an instructor. Coleridge, in his literary 
life, has pronounced a more intelligible and 
ample encomium on them. The author of 
the Country Spectator doubts not to com- 
pare him with the ablest teachers of an- 
tiquity. Perhaps we cannot dismiss him 
better than with the pious ejaculation of 
C— when he heard that his old master was 
on his death-bed: "Poor J. B.!— may all his 
faults be forgiven; and may he be wafted to 
bliss by little cherub boys, all head and 
wings, with no bottoms to reproach his sub- 
lunary infirmities." 

Under him were many good and sound 
scholars bred.— First Grecian of my time 
was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, kindest of boys 
and men, since Co-grammar-master (and 

inseparable companion) with Dr. T e. 

What an edifying spectacle did this brace 
of friends present to those who remembered 
the anti-socialities of their predecessors!— 
You never met the one by chance in the 
street without a wonder, which was quickly 
dissipated by the almost immediate sub- 
appearance of the other. Generally arm 
in arm, these kindly coadjutors lightened 
48 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 



for each other the toilsome duties of their 
profession, and when, in advanced age, one 
found it convenient to retire, the other was 
not long in discovering that it suited him 
to lay down the fasces also. Oh, it is pleas- 
ant, as it is rare, to find the same arm 
linked in yours at forty which at thirteen 
helped it to turn over the Cicero De Amici- 
tia, or some tale of Antique Friendship, 
which the young heart even then was burn- 
ing to anticipate!— Co-Grecian with S. was 

Th , who has since executed with ability 

various diplomatic functions at the North- 
ern courts. Th was a tall, dark, satur- 
nine youth, sparing of speech, with raven 
locks.— Thomas Fanshaw Middleton fol- 
lowed him (now Bishop of Calcutta), a 
scholar and a gentleman in his teens. He 
has the reputation of an excellent critic; 
and is author (besides the Country Specta- 
tor) of a Treatise on the Greek Article, 
against Sharpe.— M. is said to bear his miter 
high in India, where the regni novitas (I 
dare say) sufficiently justifies the bearing. 
A humility quite as primitive as that of 
Jewel or Hooker might not be exactly fit- 
ted to impress the minds of those Anglo- 
Asiatic diocesans with a reverence for home 
institutions, and the church which those 
fathers watered. The manners of M. at 
^ 49 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



school, though firm, were mild and unas- 
suming.— Next to M. (if not senior to him) 
was Richards, author of the Aboriginal 
Britons, the most spirited of the Oxford 
Prize Poems; a pale, studious Grecian.— 

Then followed poor S , ill-fated M ! 

of these the Muse is silent. 

Finding some of Edward's race 
Unhappy, pass their annals by. 

Come back into memory, like as thou 
wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with 
hope like a fiery column before thee— the 
dark pillar not yet turned— Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge— Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! 
—How have I seen the casual passer 
through the Cloisters stand still, entranced 
with admiration (while he weighed the dis- 
proportion between the speech and the garb 
of the young Mirandula), to hear thee un- 
fold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the 
mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for 
even in those years thou waxedst not pale 
at such philosophic draughts), or reciting 
Homer in his Greek, or Pindar — while the 
walls of the old Grey Friars reechoed to the 
accents of the inspired charity-boy!— Many 
were the "wit-combats" (to dally awhile 
with the words of old Fuller) between him 
50 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 



and C. V. Le G , "which two I behold 

a Spanish great galleon, and an English like 
man-of-war: Master Coleridge, like the 
former, was built far higher in learning, 
solid, but slow in his performances. C. V. 
L., with the English man-of-war, lesser in 
bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with 
all tides, tack about, and take advantage of 
all winds, by the quickness of his wit and 
invention." 

Nor shalt thou, their compeer, be quickly 
forgotten, Allen, with the cordial smile, and 
still more cordial laugh, with which thou 
wert wont to make the old Cloisters shake, 
in thy cognition of some poignant jest of 
theirs; or the anticipation of some more 
material, and peradventure practical one, 
of thine own. Extinct are those smiles, 
with that beautiful countenance, with which 
(for thou wert the Nireus formosus of the 
school), in the days of thy maturer waggery, 
thou didst disarm the wrath of infuriated 
town-damsel, who, incensed by provoking 
pinch, turning tigress-like round, suddenly 
converted by thy angel-look, exchanged the 

half-formed terrible " bl ," for a gentler 

greeting— "6 ?ess thy handsome face ! " 

Next follow two, who ought to be now 
alive, and the friends of Elia— the junior Le 

G and F ; who impelled, the former 

51 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



by a roving temper, the latter by too quick 
a sense of neglect— ill capable of enduring 
the slights poor Sizars are sometimes sub- 
ject to in our seats of learning— exchanged 
their Alma Mater for the camp; perishing, 
one by climate, and one on the plains of 

Salamanca:— Le G , sanguine, volatile, 

sweet-natured; P , dogged, faithful, an- 

ticipative of insult, warm-hearted, with 
something of the old Roman height about 
him. 

Fine, frank-hearted Fr , the present 

master of Hertford, with Marmaduke T , 

mildest of Missionaries— and both my good 
friends still— close the catalogue of Grecians 
in my time. 



52 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN 



THE human species, according to the 
best theory I can form of it, is com- 
posed of two distinct races, the men 
who borrow, and the men who lend. To 
these two original diversities may be re- 
duced all those impertinent classifications 
of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black 
men, red men. All the dwellers upon 
earth, "Parthians, and Medes, and Elam- 
ites," flock hither, and do naturally fall in 
with one or other of these primary distinc- 
tions. The infinite superiority of the 
former, which I choose to designate as the 
great raee, is discernible in their figure, 
port, and a certain instinctive sovereignty. 
The latter are born degraded. "He shall 
serve his brethren." There is something 
in the air of one of this cast, lean and sus- 
picious; contrasting with the open, trusting, 
generous manners of the other. 

Observe who have been the greatest bor- 
rowers of all ages— Alcibiades— Falstaff— 
Sir Richard Steele— our late incomparable 
Brinsley— what a family likeness in all four! 
53 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



What a careless, even deportment hath 
your borrower! what rosy gills! what a 
beautiful reliance on Providence doth he 
manifest, — taking no more thought than 
lilies! What contempt for money,— ac- 
counting it (yours and mine especially) no 
better than dross! What a liberal con- 
founding of those pedantic distinctions of 
meum and tuum ! or rather, what a noble 
simplification of language (beyond Tooke), 
resolving these supposed opposites into one 
clear, intelligible pronoun adjective!— What 
near approaches doth he make to the primi- 
tive community,— to the extent of one half 
of the principle at least. 

He is the true taxer who " calleth all the 
world up to be taxed"; and the distance is 
as vast between him and one of us, as sub- 
sisted between the Augustan Majesty and 
the poorest obolary Jew that paid it tribute- 
pittance at Jerusalem!— His exactions, too, 
have such a cheerful, voluntary air! So far 
removed from your sour parochial or state 
gatherers,— those inkhorn varlets, who 
carry their want of welcome in their faces! 
He Cometh to you with a smile, and trou- 
bleth you with no receipt; confining himself 
to no set season. Every day is his Candle- 
mas, or his feast of Holy Michael. He ap- 
plieth the lene tormentum of a pleasant look 
54 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN 

to your purse,— which to that gentle warmth 
expands her silken leaves, as naturally as 
the cloak of the traveler, for which sun and 
wind contended! He is the true Propontic 
which never ebbeth ! The sea which taketh 
handsomely at each man's hand. In vain 
the victim, whom he delighteth to honor, 
struggles with destiny; he is in the net. 
Lend therefore cheerfully, man ordained 
to lend— that thou lose not in the end, with 
thy worldly penny, the reversion promised. 
Combine not preposterously in thine own 
person the penalties of Lazarus and of 
Dives!— but, when thou seest the proper 
authority coming, meet it smilingly, as it 
were half-way. Come, a handsome sacri- 
fice! See how light he makes of it! Strain 
not courtesies with a noble enemy. 

Reflections like the foregoing were forced 
upon my mind by the death of my old friend, 
Ralph Bigod, Esq., who parted this life on 
Wednesday evening; dying, as he had lived, 
without much trouble. He boasted himself 
a descendant from mighty ancestors of that 
name, who heretofore held ducal dignities 
in this realm. In his actions and senti- 
ments he belied not the stock to which he 
pretended. Early in life he found himself 
invested with ample revenues; which, with 
that noble disinterestedness which I have 
55 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



noticed as inherent in men of the great 
race, he took almost immediate measures 
entirely to dissipate and bring to nothing: 
for there is something revolting in the idea 
of a king holding a private purse; and the 
thoughts of Bigod were all regal. Thus 
furnished, by the very act of disfurnish- 
ment; getting rid of the cumbersome lug- 
gage of riches, more apt (as one sings) 

To slacken virtue, and abate her edge, 

Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise, 

he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his 
great enterprise, "borrowing and to bor- 
row!" 

In his periegesis, or triumphant progress 
throughout this island, it has been calcu- 
lated that he laid a tithe part of the inhabi- 
tants under contribution. I reject this 
estimate as greatly exaggerated:— but hav- 
ing had the honor of accompanying my 
friend, divers times, in his perambulations 
about this vast city, I own I was greatly 
struck at first with the prodigious number 
of faces we met, who claimed a sort of re- 
spectful acquaintance with us. He was one 
day so obliging as to explain the phenome- 
non. It seems these were his tributaries; 
feeders of his exchequer; gentlemen, his 
56 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN 

good friends (as he was pleased to express 
himself), to whom he had occasionally been 
beholden for a loan. Their multitudes did 
no way disconcert him. He rather took a 
pride in numbering them; and, with Comus, 
seemed pleased to be " stocked with so fair 
a herd." 

With such sources, it was a wonder how 
he contrived to keep his treasury always 
empty. He did it by force of an aphorism, 
which he had often in his mouth, that 
"money kept longer than three days 
stinks." So he made use of it while it was 
fresh. A good part he drank away (for he 
was an excellent toss-pot), some he gave 
away, the rest he threw away, literally toss- 
ing and hurling it violently from him — as 
boys do burs, or as if it had been infec- 
tious,— into ponds, or ditches, or deep holes, 
inscrutable cavities of the earth;— or he 
would bury it (where he would never seek 
it again) by a river's side under some bank, 
which (he would facetiously observe) paid 
no interest— but out away from him it must 
go peremptorily, as Hagar's offspring into 
the wilderness, while it was sweet. He 
never missed it. The streams were peren- 
nial which fed his fisc. When new supplies 
became necessary, the first person that had 
the felicity to fall in with him, friend or 
57 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



stranger, was sure to contribute to the de- 
ficiency. For Bigod had an undeniable way 
with him. He had a cheerful, open exte- 
rior, a quick jovial eye, a bald forehead, just 
touched with gray (cana fides). He antici- 
pated no excuse, and found none. And, 
waiving for a while my theory as to the 
great race, I would put it to the most un- 
theorizing reader, who may at times have 
disposable coin in his pocket, whether it is 
not more repugnant to the kindliness of his 
nature to refuse such a one as I am describ- 
ing, than to say no to a poor petitionary 
rogue (your bastard borrower), who, by his 
mumping visnomy, tells you that he expects 
nothing better; and, therefore, whose pre- 
conceived notions and expectations you do 
in reality so much less shock in the refusal. 

When I think of this man; his fiery glow 
of heart; his swell of feeling; how magnifi- 
cent, how ideal he was; how great at the 
midnight hour; and when I compare with 
him the companions with whom I have as- 
sociated since, I grudge the saving of a few 
idle ducats, and think that I am fallen into 
the society of lenders, and little men. 

To one like Elia, whose treasures are ra- 
ther cased in leather covers than closed in 
iron coffers, there is a class of alienators 
more formidable than that which I have 
58 



THE TWO RACES OP MEN 

touched upon; I mean your borrowers of 
books — those mutilators of collections, 
spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and 
creators of odd volumes. There is Com- 
berbatch, matchless in his depredations! 

That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing 
you, like a great eye-tooth knocked out— 
(you are now with me in my little back 
study in Bloomsbury, Reader!)— with the 
huge Switzer-like tomes on each side (like 
the Guildhall giants, in their reformed pos- 
ture, guardant of nothing) once held the 
tallest of my folios. Opera Bonaventurce, 
choice and massy divinity, to which its 
two supporters (school divinity also, but of 
a lesser caliber, — Bellarmine and Holy 
Thomas), showed but as dwarfs,— itself an 
Ascaipart I— that Comberbatch abstracted 
upon the faith of a theory he holds, which 
is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by 
than to refute, namely, that "the title to 
property in a book (my Bonaventure, for 
instance) is in exact ratio to the claimant's 
powers of understanding and appreciating 
the same." Should he go on acting upon 
this theory, which of our shelves is safe? 

The slight vacuum in the left-hand case 

—two shelves from the ceiling— scarcely 

distinguishable but by the quick eye of a 

loser— was whilom the commodious resting- 

59 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



place of Browne on Urn Burial. C. will 
hardly allege that he knows more about 
that treatise than I do, who introduced it to 
him, and was indeed the first (of the mod- 
erns) to discover its beauties— but so have 
I known a foolish lover to praise his mis- 
tress in the presence of a rival more quali- 
fied to carry her off than himself.— Just be- 
low, Dodsley's dramas want their fourth 
volume, where Vittoria Corombona is! The 
remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam's 
refuse sons, when the Fates borrowed 
Hector. Here stood the Anatomy of Mel- 
ancholy, in sober state.— There loitered the 
Complete Angler; quiet as in life, by some 
stream-side. In yonder nook, John Buncle, 
a widower-volume, with "eyes closed," 
mourns his ravished mate. 

One justice I must do my friend, that if 
he sometimes, like the sea, sweeps away 
a treasure, at another time, sea-like, he 
throws up as rich an equivalent to match 
it. I have a small under-collection of this 
nature (my friend's gatherings in his vari- 
ous calls), picked up, he has forgotten at 
what odd places, and deposited with as 
little memory at mine. I take in these 
orphans, the twice-deserted. These prose- 
lytes of the gate are welcome as the true 
Hebrews. There they stand in conjunction j 
60 



THE TWO RACES OP MEN 

natives and naturalized. The latter seem 
as little disposed to inquire out their true 
lineage as I am.— I charge no warehouse- 
room for these deodands, nor shall ever put 
myself to the ungentlemanly trouble of ad- 
vertising a sale of them to pay expenses. 

To lose a volume to C. carries some sense 
and meaning in it. You are sure that he 
will make one hearty meal on your viands, if 
he can give no account of the platter after 
it. But what moved thee, wayward, spite- 
ful K., to be so importunate to carry off with 
thee, in spite of tears and adjurations to 
thee to forbear, the Letters of that princely 
woman, the thrice noble Margaret New- 
castle—knowing at the time, and knowing 
that I knew also, thou most assuredly 
wouldst never turn over one leaf of the il- 
lustrious folio:— what but the mere spirit 
of contradiction, and childish love of get- 
ting the better of thy friend?— Then, worst 
cut of all! to transport it with thee to the 
Gallican land— 

Unworthy land to harbor such a sweetness, 
A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt, 
Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her 
sex's wonder ! 

— hadst thou not thy play-books, and books 

of jests and fancies, about thee, to keep 

61 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



thee merry, even as thou keepest all com- 
panies with thy quips and mirthful tales? 
Child of the Green-room, it was unkindly 
done of thee. Thy wife, too, that part- 
French, better-part-English woman!— that 
she could fix upon no other treatise to bear 
away, in kindly token of remembering us, 
than the works of Fulke Greville, Lord 
Brooke— of which no Frenchman, nor wo- 
man of France, Italy, or England, was ever 
by nature constituted to comprehend a 
tittle! Was there not Zimmermann on 
Solitude ? 

Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a 
moderate collection, be shy of showing it; 
or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, 
lend thy books; but let it be to such a one 
as S. T. C— he will return them (generally 
anticipating the time appointed) with usury; 
enriched with annotations, tripling their 
value. I have had experience. Many are 
these precious MSS.of his— (in matter often- 
times, and almost in quantity not unfre- 
quently, vying with the originals) in no 
very clerkly hand— legible in my Daniel; in 
old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and 
those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, 
now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands.— I 
counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy 
library, against S. T. C. 
62 



NEW YEAR'S EVE 



EVERY man hath two birthdays: two 
days at least, in every year, which 
set him upon revolving the lapse of 
time, as it affects his mortal duration. The 
one is that which in an especial manner he 
termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of 
old observances, this custom of solemnizing 
our proper birthday hath nearly passed 
away, or is left to children, who reflect no- 
thing at all about the matter, nor under- 
stand anything in it beyond cake and 
orange. But the birth of a New Year is of 
an interest too wide to be pretermitted by 
king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the 
First of January with indifference. It is 
that from which all date their time, and 
count upon what is left. It is the nativity 
of our common Adam. 

Of all sound of all bells— (bells, the music 
nighest bordering upon heaven)— most sol- 
emn and touching is the peal which rings 
out the Old Year. I never hear it without 
a gathering-up of my mind to a concentra- 
tion of all the images that have been dif- 
63 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



fused over the past twelvemonth; all I have 
done or suffered, performed or neglected— 
in that regretted time. I begin to know its 
worth, as when a person dies. It takes a 
personal color; nor was it a poetical flight 
in a contemporary, when he exclaimed, 

I saw the skirts of the departing Year. 

It is no more than what in sober sadness 
every one of us seems to be conscious of, in 
that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt 
it, and all felt it with me, last night; though 
some of my companions affected rather to 
manifest an exhilaration at the birth of the 
coming year, than any very tender regrets 
for the decease of its predecessor. But I 
am none of those who— 

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest. 

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novel- 
ties; new books, new faces, new years,— 
from some mental twist which makes it 
difficult in me to face the prospective. I 
have almost ceased to hope; and am san- 
guine only in the prospects of other (former) 
years. I plunge into foregone visions and 
conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with 
past disappointments. I am armor-proof 
64 



NEW YEAR'S EVE 



against old discouragements. I forgive, or 
overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play 
over again /or love, as the gamesters phrase 
it, games for which I once paid so dear. I 
would scarce now have any of those unto- 
ward accidents and events of my life re- 
versed. I would no more alter them than 
the incidents of some well-contrived novel. 
Methinks, it is better that I should have 
pined away seven of my goldenest years, 
when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer 
eyes, of Alice W n, than that so passion- 
ate a love-adventure should be lost. It was 
better that our family should have missed 
that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us 
of, than that I should have at this moment 
two thousand pounds in banco, and be with- 
out the idea of that specious old rogue. 

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my 
infirmity to look back upon those early days. 
Do I advance a paradox when I say, that, 
skipping over the intervention of forty 
years, a man may have leave to love him- 
self without the imputation of self-love? 

If I know aught of myself, no one whose 
mind is introspective— and mine is pain- 
fully so— can have a less respect for his 
present identity than I have for the man 
Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and 
humorsome; a notorious * * *; addicted 
? 65 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



to * * *; averse from counsel, neither tak- 
ing it, nor offering it;—* * * besides; a 
stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it 
on, and spare not; I subscribe to it all, and 
much more, than thou canst be willing to 
lay at his door— but for the child Elia— 
that "other me," there, in the background 
—I must take leave to cherish the remem- 
brance of that young master— with as little 
reference, I protest, to his stupid change- 
ling of five and forty, as if it had been a 
child of some other house, and not of my 
parents. I can cry over its patient small- 
pox at five, and rougher medicaments. I 
can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick 
pillow at Christ's, and wake with it in sur- 
prise at the gentle posture of maternal ten- 
derness hanging over it, that unknown had 
watched its sleep. I know how it shrank 
from any the least color of falsehood.— God 
help thee, Elia, how art thou changed!— 
Thou art sophisticated.— I know how hon- 
est, how courageous (for a weakling) it was 
—how religious, how imaginative, how 
hopeful! From what have I not fallen, if 
the child I remember was indeed myself, 
—and not some dissembling guardian, pre- 
senting a false identity, to give the rule to 
my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone 
of my moral being! 

66 



NEW YEAR'S EVE 



That I am fond of indulging, beyond a 
hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, 
may be the symptom of some sickly idio- 
syncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause: 
simply, that being without wife or family, 
I have not learned to project myself enough 
out of myself; and having no offspring of 
my own to dally with, I turn back upon 
memory, and adopt my own early idea, as 
my heir and favorite? If these speculations 
seem fantastical to thee. Reader— (a busy 
man, perchance), if I tread out of the way 
of thy sympathy, and am singularly con- 
ceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridi- 
cule, under the phantom cloud of Elia. 

The elders, with whom I was brought up, 
were of a character not likely to let slip the 
sacred observance of any old institution; 
and the ringing out of the Old Year was 
kept by them with circumstances of peculiar 
ceremony.— In those days the sound of 
those midnight chimes, though it seemed 
to raise hilarity in all around me, never 
failed to bring a train of pensive imagery 
into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived 
what it meant, or thought of it as a reck- 
oning that concerned me. Not childhood 
alone, but the young man till thirty, never 
feels practically that he is mortal. He 
knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could 
67 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



preach a homily on the fragility of life; but 
he brings it not home to himself, any more 
than in a hot June we can appropriate to 
our imagination the freezing days of Decem- 
ber. But now, shall I confess a truth?— I 
feel these audits but too powerfully. I be- 
gin to count the probabilities of my dura- 
tion, and to grudge at the expenditure of 
moments and shortest periods, like misers' 
farthings. In proportion as the years both 
lessen and shorten, I set more count upon 
their periods, and would fain lay my inef- 
fectual finger upon the spoke of the great 
wheel. I am not content to pass away " like 
a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors sol- 
ace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable 
draught of mortality. I care not to be car- 
ried with the tide, that smoothly bears 
human life to eternity; and reluct at the 
inevitable course of destiny. I am in love 
with this green earth, the face of town and 
country, the unspeakable rural solitudes, 
and the sweet security of streets. I would 
set up my tabernacle here. I am content 
to stand still at the age to which I am ar- 
rived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, 
no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to 
be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow 
fruit, as they say, into the grave.— Any 
alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or 
68 



NEW YEAR'S EVE 



in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. 
My household gods plant a terrible fixed 
foot, and are not rooted up without blood. 
They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. 
A new state of being staggers me. 

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary 
walks, and summer holidays, and the green- 
ness of fields, and the delicious juices of 
meats and fishes, and society, and the cheer- 
ful glass, and candle-light, and fireside con- 
versations, and innocent vanities, and jests, 
and irony itself— do these things go out 
with life? 

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt 
sides, when you are pleasant with him? 

And you, my midnight darlings, my 
Folios; must I part with the intense delight 
of having you (huge armfuls) in my em- 
braces? Must knowledge come to me, if it 
come at all, by some awkward experiment 
of intuition, and no longer by this familiar 
process of reading? 

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting 
the smiling indications which point me to 
them here,— the recognizable face— the 
"sweet assurance of a look"? 

In winter this intolerable disinclination to 

dying— to give it its mildest name— does 

more especially haunt and beset me. In a 

genial August noon, beneath a sweltering 

69 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



sky, death is almost problematic. At those 
times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy 
an immortality. Then we expand and bur- 
geon. Then are we as strong again, as val- 
iant again, as wise again, and a great deal 
taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, 
puts me in thoughts of death. All things 
allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that 
master feeling; cold, numbness, dreams, 
perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shad- 
owy and spectral appearances,— that cold 
ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister, 
like that innutritions one denounced in the 
Canticles:— I am none of her minions— I 
hold with the Persian. 

Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of 
my way, brings death unto my mind. All 
partial evils, like humors, run into that 
capital plague-sore.— I have heard some 
profess an indifference to life. Such hail 
the end of their existence as a port of refuge; 
and speak of the grave as of some soft 
arms, in which they may slumber as on a 
pillow. Some have wooed death— but out 
upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom! 
I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar 
John) give thee to sixscore thousand devils, 
as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, 
but shunned as an universal viper; to be 
branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! In 
70 



NEW YEAR'S EVE 



no way can I be brought to digest thee, 
thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more 
frightful and confounding Positive! 

Those antidotes, prescribed against the 
fear of thee, are altogether frigid and in- 
sulting, like thyself. For what satisfaction 
hath a man, that he shall "lie down with 
kings and emperors in death," who in his 
lifetime never greatly coveted the society 
of such bedfellows?— or, forsooth, that "so 
shall the fairest face appear"?— why, to 
comfort me, must Alice W— — n be a goblin? 
More than all, I conceive disgust at those 
impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, 
inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. 
Every dead man must take upon himself to 
be lecturing me with his odious truism, 
that " Such as he now is I must shortly be." 
Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou 
imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. 
I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. 
Know thy betters! Thy New Years' days 
are past. I survive, a jolly candidate for 
1821. Another cup of wine— and while that 
turncoat bell, that just now mournfully 
chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed, with 
changed notes lustily rings in a successor, 
let us attune to its peal the song made on 
a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. 
Cotton, 

71 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



THE NEW YEAR 

Hark, the cock crows, and yon bright star 

Tells us, the day himself 's not far ; 

And see where, breaking from the night, 

He gilds the western hills with light. 

With him old Janus doth appear. 

Peeping into the future year, 

With such a look as seems to say 

The prospect is not good that way. 

Thus do we rise ill sights to see. 

And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy ; 

When the prophetic fear of things 

A more tormenting mischief brings, 

More full of soul-tormenting gall 

Than direst mischiefs can befall. 

But stay ! but stay ! methinks my sight, 

Better inform' d by clearer light. 

Discerns sereneness in that brow 

That all contracted seemed but now. 

His revers'd face may show distaste, 

And frown upon the ills are past ; 

But that which this way looks is clear, 

And smiles upon the New-born Year. 

He looks too from a place so high. 

The year lies open to his eye ; 

And all the moments open are 

To the exact discoverer. 

Yet more and more he smiles upon 

The happy revolution. 

Why should we then suspect or fear 

The influences of a year. 

So smiles upon us the first morn. 

And speaks us good so soon as born ? 

72 



NEW YEAR'S EVE 



Plague on 't ! the last was ill enough, 

This cannot but make better proof; 

Or, at the worst, as we brush' d through 

The last, why so we may this too ; 

And then the next in reason shou'd 

Be superexcellently good : 

For the worst ills (we daily see) 

Have no more perpetuity 

Than the best fortunes that do fall ; 

Which also bring us wherewithal 

Longer their being to support, 

Than those do of the other sort : 

And who has one good year in three, 

And yet repines at destiny, 

Appears ungrateful in the case, 

And merits not the good he has. 

Then let us welcome the New Guest 

With lusty brimmers of the best : 

Mirth always should Grood Fortune meet, 

And renders e'en Disaster sweet : 

And though the Princess turn her back, 

Let us but line ourselves with sack. 

We better shall by far hold out, 

Till the next year she face about. 

How say you, Reader— do not these verses 
smack of the rough magnanimity of the old 
EngHsh vein? Do they not fortify like a 
cordial; enlarging the heart, and productive 
of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the 
concoction? Where be those puling fears 
of death, just now expressed or affected?— 
Passed like a cloud— absorbed in the purg- 
ing sunlight of clear poetry— clean washed 

73 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



away by a wave of genuine Helicon, your 
only Spa for these hypochondries.— And 
now another cup of the generous! and a 
merry New Year, and many of them to you 
all, my masters! 



74 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 



" A CLEAR fire, a clean hearth, and the 
/\ rigor of the game." This was the 
JL \^ celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle 
(now with God), who, next to her devotions, 
loved a good game of whist. She was none 
of your lukewarm gamesters, your half-and- 
half players, who have no objection to take 
a hand, if you want one to make up a rub- 
ber; who affirm that they have no pleasure 
in winning; that they like to win one game 
and lose another; that they can while away 
an hour very agreeably at a card-table, but 
are indifferent whether they play or no; and 
will desire an adversary, who has slipped a 
wrong card, to take it up and play another. 
These insufferable trifiers are the curse of 
a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole 
pot. Of such it may be said that they do 
not play at cards, but only play at playing 
at them. 

Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She 

detested them, as I do, from her heart and 

soul, and would not, save upon a striking 

emergency, willingly seat herself at the 

75 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



same table with them. She loved a thor- 
ough-paced partner, a determined enemy. 
She took, and gave, no concessions. She 
hated ;favors. She never made a revoke, 
nor ever passed it over in her adversary 
without exacting the utmost forfeiture. She 
fought a good fight: cut and thrust. She 
held not her good sword (her cards) " like a 
dancer." She sate bolt upright; and neither 
showed you her cards, nor desired to see 
yours. All people have their blind side— 
their superstitions; and I have heard her 
declare, under the rose, that Hearts was 
her favorite suit. 

I never in my life— and I knew Sarah 
Battle many of the best years of it— saw 
her take out her snuff-box when it was her 
turn to play; or snuff a candle in the mid- 
dle of a game; or ring for a servant, till it 
was fairly over. She never introduced, or 
connived at, miscellaneous conversation 
during its process. As she emphatically 
observed, cards were cards; and if I ever 
saw unmingled distaste in her fine last- 
century countenance, it was at the airs of 
a young gentleman of a literary turn, who 
had been with difficulty persuaded to take 
a hand; and who, in his excess of candor, 
declared that he thought there was no 
harm in unbending the mind now and then, 
76 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 

after serious studies, in recreations of that 
kind ! She could not bear to have her nohle 
occupation, to which she wound up her 
faculties, considered in that light. It was 
her business, her duty, the thing she came 
into the world to do,— and she did it. She 
unbent her mind afterwards— over a book. 

Pope was her favorite author: his Rape 
of the Lock her favorite work. She once 
did me the favor to play over with me (with 
the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in 
that poem; and to explain to me how far it 
agreed with, and in what points it would be 
found to differ from, tradrille. Her illus- 
trations were apposite and poignant; and I 
had the pleasure of sending the substance 
of them to Mr. Bowles; but I suppose they 
came too late to be inserted among his in- 
genious notes upon that author. 

Quadrille, she has often told me, was her 
first love; but whist had engaged her ma- 
turer esteem. The former, she said, was 
showy and specious, and likely to allure 
young persons. The uncertainty and quick 
shifting of partners— a thing which the 
constancy of whist abhors;— the dazzling 
supremacy and regal investiture of Spadille 
—absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure 
aristocracy of whist, where his crown and 
garter give him no proper power above his 
77 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



brother-nobility of the Aces;— the giddy- 
vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of 
playing along; above all, the overpowering 
attractions of a Sans Prendre Vole,— to the 
triumph of which there is certainly no- 
thing parallel or approaching, in the con- 
tingencies of whist;— all these, she would 
say, make quadrille a game of captivation 
to the young and enthusiastic. But whist 
was the solider game: that was her word. 
It was a long meal; not like quadrille, a 
feast of snatches. One or two rubbers 
might co-extend in duration with an even- 
ing. They gave time to form rooted friend- 
ships, to cultivate steady enmities. She 
despised the chance-started, capricious, and 
ever-fluctuating alliances of the other. 
The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, 
reminded her of the petty ephemeral em- 
broilments of the little Italian states, de- 
picted by Machiavel: perpetually changing 
postures and connections; bitter foes to- 
day, sugared darlings to-morrow; kissing 
and scratching in a breath;— but the wars 
of whist were comparable to the long, steady, 
deep-rooted, rational antipathies of the 
great French and English nations. 

A grave simplicity was what she chiefly 
admired in her favorite game. There was 
nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage 
78 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 

—nothing superfluous. No flushes— that 
most irrational of all pleas that a reasonable 
being can set up:— that any one should 
claim four by virtue of holding cards of the 
same mark and color, without reference to 
the playing of the game, or the individual 
worth or pretensions of the cards them- 
selves. She held this to be a solecism; as 
pitiful an ambition at cards as alliteration 
is in authorship. She despised superfici- 
ality, and looked deeper than the colors of 
things.— Suits were soldiers, she would say, 
and must have a uniformity of array to dis- 
tinguish them: but what should we say to 
a foolish squire, who should claim a merit 
from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets, 
that never were to be marshaled— never to 
take the field?— She even wished that whist 
were more simple than it is; and, in my 
mind, would have stripped it of some ap- 
pendages, which, in the state of human 
frailty, may be venially, and even commend- 
ably, allowed of. She saw no reason for 
the deciding of the trump by the turn of the 
card. Why not one suit always trumps?— 
Why two colors, when the mark of the suits 
would have sufficiently distinguished them 
without it? 

" But the eye, my dear madam, is agree- 
ably refreshed with the variety. Man is 
79 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



not a creature of pure reason— he must 
have his senses delightfully appealed to. 
We see it in Roman Catholic countries, 
where the music and the paintings draw in 
many to worship, whom your Quaker spirit 
of unsensualizing would have kept out.— 
You yourself have a pretty collection of 
paintings— but confess to me, whether, 
walking in your gallery at Sandham, among 
those clear Vandykes, or among the Paul 
Potters in the anteroom, you ever felt 
your bosom glow with an elegant delight, 
at all comparable to that you have it in 
your power to experience most evenings 
over a well-arranged assortment of the 
court-cards?— the pretty antic habits, like 
heralds in a procession— the gay triumph- 
assuring scarlets— the contrasting deadly- 
killing sables— the ' hoary majesty of spades' 
— Pam in all his glory!— 

"All these might be dispensed with; and 
with their naked names upon the drab 
pasteboard, the game might go on very well, 
pictureless; but the beauty of cards would 
be extinguished forever. Stripped of all 
that is imaginative in them, they must 
degenerate into mere gambling. Imagine 
a dull deal board, or drumhead, to spread 
them on, instead of that nice verdant car- 
pet (next to nature's), fittest arena for those 
80 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 

courtly combatants to play their gallant 
justs and tourneys in!— Exchange those 
delicately turned ivory markers— (work of 
Chinese artist, unconscious of their symbol, 
—or as profanely slighting their true appli- 
cation as the arrantest Ephesian journey- 
man that turned out those little shrines for 
the goddess)— exchange them for little bits 
of leather (our ancestors' money), or chalk 
and a slate!"— 

The old lady, with a smile, confessed the 
soundness of my logic; and to her approba- 
tion of my arguments on her favorite topic 
that evening I have always fancied myself 
indebted for the legacy of a curious crib- 
bage-board, made of the finest Sienna mar- 
ble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter 
Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) 
brought with him from Florence:— this, 
and a trifle of five hundred pounds, came to 
me at her death. 

The former bequest (which I do not least 
value) I have kept with religious care; 
though she herself, to confess a truth, was 
never greatly taken with cribbage. It was 
an essentially vulgar game, I have heard 
her say,— disputing with her uncle, who 
was very partial to it. She could never 
heartily bring her mouth to pronounce " Go,''^ 
—or " That 's a go." She called it an un- 
^ 81 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



grammatical game. The pegging teased 
her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a 
five-dollar stake) because she would not take 
advantage of the turn-up knave, which 
would have given it her, but which she 
must have claimed by the disgraceful ten- 
ure of declaring " two for his heels" There 
is something extremely genteel in this sort 
of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentle- 
woman born. 

Piquet she held the best game at the 
cards for two persons, though she would 
ridicule the pedantry of the terms— such as 
pique— repique— the capot— they savored 
(she thought) of affectation. But games 
for two, or even three, she never greatly 
cared for. She loved the quadrate, or 
square. She would argue thus:— Cards are 
warfare: the ends are gain, with glory. 
But cards are war, in disguise of a sport: 
when single adversaries encounter, the 
ends proposed are too palpable. By them- 
selves, it is too close a fight; with specta- 
tors it is not much bettered. No looker-on 
can be interested, except for a bet, and then 
it is a mere affair of money; he cares not 
for your luck sympathetically, or for your 
play.— Three are still worse; a mere naked 
war of every man against every man, as in 
cribbage, without league or alliance; or a 
82 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 

rotation of petty and contradictory inter- 
ests, a succession of heartless leagues, and 
not much more hearty infractions of them, 
as in tradrille.— But in square games (she 
meant whist), all that is possible to be at- 
tained in card-playing is accomplished. 
There are the incentives of profit with 
honor, common to every species— though 
the latter can be but very imperfectly en- 
joyed in those other games, where the spec- 
tator is only feebly a participator. But the 
parties in whist are spectators and princi- 
pals too. They are a theater to themselves, 
and a looker-on is not wanted. He is rather 
worse than nothing, and an impertinence. 
Whist abhors neutrality, or interests beyond 
its sphere. You glory in some surprising 
stroke of skill or fortune, not because a 
cold— or even an interested— bystander 
witnesses it, but because your partner sym- 
pathizes in the contingency. You win for 
two. You triumph for two. Two are ex- 
alted. Two again are mortified; which 
divides their disgrace, as the conjunction 
doubles (by taking off the invidiousness) 
your glories. Two losing to two are better 
reconciled, than one to one in that close 
butchery. The hostile feeling is weakened 
by multiplying the channels. War becomes 
a civil game.— By such reasonings as these 
83 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



the old lady was accustomed to defend her 
favorite pastime. 

No inducement could ever prevail upon 
her to play at any game, where chance en- 
tered into the composition, for nothing. 
Chance, she would argue— and here again, 
admire the subtlety of her conclusion;— 
chance is nothing, but where something 
else depends upon it. It is obvious that 
cannot be glory. What rational cause of 
exultation could it give to a man to turn up 
size ace a hundred times together by him- 
self? or before spectators, where no stake 
was depending?— Make a lottery of a hun- 
dred thousand tickets with but one fortu- 
nate number— and what possible principle 
of our nature, except stupid wonderment, 
could it gratify to gain that number as 
many times successively without a prize? 
Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance 
in backgammon, where it was not played for 
money. She called it foolish, and those 
people idiots, who were taken with a lucky 
hit under such circumstances. Games of 
pure skill were as little to her fancy. Played 
for a stake, they were a mere system of 
overreaching. Played for glory, they were 
a mere setting of one man's wit,— his mem- 
ory, or combination-faculty rather— against 
another's; like a mock-engagement at a 
84 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 

review, bloodless and profitless. She could 
not conceive a game wanting the spritely 
infusion of chance, the handsome excuses 
of good fortune. Two people playing at 
chess in a corner of a room, whilst whist 
was stirring in the center, would inspire 
her with insufferable horror and ennui. 
Those well-cut similitudes of Castles and 
Knights, the imagery of the board, she 
would argue (and I think in this case justly), 
were entirely misplaced and senseless. 
Those hard-head contests can in no instance 
ally with the fancy. They reject form and 
color. A pencil and dry slate (she used to 
say) were the proper arena for such com- 
batants. 

To those puny objectors against cards, as 
nurturing the bad passions, she would re- 
tort, that man is a gaming animal; he must 
be always trying to get the better in some- 
thing or other:— that this passion can 
scarcely be more safely expended than upon 
a game at cards: that cards are a temporary 
illusion; in truth, a mere drama; for we do 
but play at being mightily concerned, where 
a few idle shillings are at stake, yet, during 
the illusion, we are as mightily concerned 
as those whose stake is crowns and king- 
doms. They are a sort of dream-fighting; 
much ado; great battling, and little blood- 
85 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



shed; mighty means for disproportioned 
ends: quite as diverting, and a great deal 
more innoxious, than many of those more 
serious games of life, which men play with- 
out esteeming them to be such.— 

With great deference to the old lady's 
judgment in these matters, I think I have 
experienced some moments in my life when 
playing at cards for nothing has even been 
agreeable. When I am in sickness, or not 
in the best spirits, I sometimes call for the 
cards, and play a game at piquet for love 
with my cousin Bridget — Bridget Elia. 

I grant there is something sneaking in 
it; but with a toothache, or a sprained 
ankle,— when you are subdued and humble, 
—you are glad to put up with an inferior 
spring of action. 

There is such a thing in nature, I am con- 
vinced, as sick whist. 

I grant it is not the highest style of man 
—I deprecate the manes of Sarah Battle— 
she lives not, alas! to whom I should apolo- 
gize. 

At such times, those terms which my old 
friend objected to, come in as something 
admissible— I love to get a tierce or a qua- 
torze, though they mean nothing. I am 
subdued to an inferior interest. Those 
shadows of winning amuse me. 
86 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 

That last game I had with my sweet 
cousin (I capotted her)— (dare I tell thee 
how foolish I am?)— I wished it might have 
lasted forever, though we gained nothing 
and lost nothing, though it was a mere 
shade of play: I would be content to go on 
in that idle folly forever. The pipkin should 
he ever boiling, that was to prepare the 
gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget 
was doomed to apply after the game was 
over: and, as I do not much relish appli- 
ances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget 
and I should be ever playing. 



87 



A CHAPTER ON EARS 



I HAVE no ear.— 
Mistake me not, reader— nor imagine 
that I am by nature destitute of those 
exterior twin appendages, hanging orna- 
ments, and (architecturally speaking) hand- 
some volutes to the human capital. Better 
my mother had never borne me.— I am, I 
think, rather delicately than copiously pro- 
vided with those conduits; and I feel no 
disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, 
or the mole for her exactness, in those in- 
genious labyrinthine inlets— those indis- 
pensable side-intelligencers. 

Neither have I incurred, or done anything 
to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigure- 
ment which constrained him to draw upon 
assurance— to feel "quite unabashed " and 
at ease upon that article. I was never, I 
thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read 
them aright, is it within the compass of my 
destiny that I ever should be. 

When therefore I say that I have no ear, 
you will understand me to mean— /or music. 
To say that this heart never melted at the 



A CHAPTER ON EARS 



concord of sweet sounds, would be a foul 
self-libel. " Water parted from the sea " 
never fails to move it strangely. So does 
"In infancy." But they were used to be 
sung at her harpsichord (the old-fashioned 
instrument in vogue in those days) by a 
gentlewoman— the gentlest, sure, that ever 
merited the appellation — the sweetest — why 

should I hesitate to name Mrs. S , once 

the blooming Fanny Weatheral of the Tem- 
ple—who had power to thrill the soul of Eiia, 
small imp as he was, even in his long coats; 
and to make him glow, tremble, and blush 
with a passion that not faintly indicated 
the dayspring of that absorbing sentiment 
which was afterwards destined to over- 
whelm and subdue his nature quite for 
Alice W n. 

I even think that sentimentally I am dis- 
posed to harmony. But organically I am 
incapable of a tune. I have been practising 
" God save the King " all my life; whistling 
and humming of it over to myself in soli- 
tary corners; and am not yet arrived, they 
tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet 
hath the. loyalty of Elia never been im- 
peached. 

I am not without suspicion that I have 
an undeveloped faculty of music within me. 
For thrumming, in my wild way, on my 
89 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while 
he was engaged in an adjoining parlor,— on 
his return he was pleased to say, " he thought 
it could not he the maid ! " On his first sur- 
prise at hearing the keys touched in some- 
what an airy and masterful way, not 
dreaming of me, his suspicions had lighted 
on Jenny. But a grace, snatched from a 
superior refinement, soon convinced him 
that some heing— technically perhaps de- 
ficient, hut higher informed from a prin- 
ciple common to all the fine arts— had 
swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, 
with all her (less cultivated) enthusiasm, 
could never have elicited from them. I 
mention this as a proof of my friend's 
penetration, and not with any view of dis- 
paraging Jenny. 

Scientifically I could never he made to 
understand (yet have I taken some pains) 
what a note of music is; or how one note 
should differ from another. Much less in 
voices can I distinguish a soprano from a 
tenor. Only sometimes the thorough-bass 
I contrive to guess at, from its being super- 
eminently harsh and disagreeable. I trem- 
ble, however, for my misapplication of the 
simplest terms of that which I disclaim. 
While I profess my ignorance, I scarce 
know what to say I am ignorant of. I hate, 
90 



A CHAPTER ON EARS 



perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and 
adagio stand in the Hke relation of obscurity 
to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as conjuring 
as Baralipton. 

It is hard to stand alone in an age like 
this,— (constituted to the quick and critical 
perception of all harmonious combinations, 
I verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, 
since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut,)— to 
remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to 
the magic influences of an art which is said 
to have such an especial stroke at soothing, 
elevating, and refining the passions.— Yet, 
rather than break the candid current of my 
confessions, I must avow to you that I have 
received a great deal more pain than plea- 
sure from this so cried-up faculty. 

I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. 
A carpenter's hammer, in a warm summer 
noon, will fret me into more than mid- 
summer madness. But those unconnected, 
unset sounds, are nothing to the measured 
malice of music. The ear is passive to those 
single strokes; willingly enduring stripes 
while it hath no task to con. To music it 
cannot be passive. It will strive— mine at 
least will— 'spite of its inaptitude, to thrid 
the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully 
poring upon hieroglyphics. I have sat 
through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, 
91 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out 
into the noisiest places of the crowded 
streets, to solace myself with sounds, which 
I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of 
the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, 
barren attention! I take refuge in the un- 
pretending assemblage of honest common- 
life sounds;— and the purgatory of the 
Enraged Musician becomes my paradise. 

I have sat at an Oratorio (that profana- 
tion of the purposes of the cheerful play- 
house) watching the faces of the auditory 
in the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's 
Laughing Audience!) immovable, or affect- 
ing some faint emotion— till (as some have 
said, that our occupations in the next world 
will be but a shadow of what delighted us 
in this) I have imagined myself in some 
cold Theater in Hades, where some of the 
forms of the earthly one should be kept up, 
with none of the enjoyment ; or like that 

—Party in a parlor 
All silent and all damned. 

Above all, those insufferable concertos, 
and pieces of music, as they are called, do 
plague and embitter my apprehension.— 
Words are something; but to be exposed to 
an endless battery of mere sounds; to be 
92 



A CHAPTER ON EARS 



long a-dying; to lie stretched upon a rack 
of roses; to keep up languor by uninter- 
mitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and 
sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedi- 
ous sweetness; to fill up sound with feel- 
ing, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; 
to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to 
make the pictures for yourself; to read a 
book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the 
verbal matter; to invent extempore trage- 
dies to answer to the vague gestures of an 
inexplicable rambling mime— these are faint 
shadows of what I have undergone from a 
series of the ablest-executed pieces of this 
empty instrumental music. 

I deny not, that in the opening of a con- 
cert, I have experienced something vastly 
lulling and agreeable:— afterwards follow- 
eth the languor and the oppression.— Like 
that disappointing book in Patmos; or, like 
the comings on of melancholy, described by 
Burton, doth music make her first insinu- 
ating approaches:— "Most pleasant it is to 
such as are melancholy given, to walk alone 
in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and 
water, by some brookside, and to meditate 
upon some delightsome and pleasant sub- 
ject, which shall affect him most, amdbilis 
insania, and mentis gratissimus error. A 
most incomparable delight to build castles 
93 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



in the air, to go smiling to themselves, act- 
ing an infinite variety of parts, which they 
suppose, and strongly imagine, they act, or 
that they see done.— So delightsome these 
toys at first, they could spend whole days 
and nights without sleep, even whole years 
in such contemplations, and fantastica, 
meditations, which are like so many dreams, 
and will hardly he drawn from them— wind- 
ing and unwinding themselves as so many 
clocks, and still pleasing their humors, until 
at the last the scene TURNS upon a sudden, 
and they heing now habitated to such medi- 
tations and solitary places, can endure no 
company, can think of nothing but harsh 
and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, 
suspicion, subrusticus pudor, discontent, 
cares, and weariness of life, surprise them 
on a sudden, and they can think of nothing 
else: continually suspecting, no sooner are 
their eyes open, but this infernal plague of 
melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies 
their souls, representing some dismal object 
to their minds; which now, by no means, no 
labor, no persuasions, they can avoid, they 
cannot be rid of, they cannot resist." 

Something like this "SCENE TURNING" 
I have experienced at the evening parties 
at the house of my good Catholic friend 

Nov ; who, by the aid of a capital organ, 

94 



A CHAPTER ON EARS 



himself the most finished of players, con- 
verts his drawing-room into a chapel, his 
week-days into Sundays, and these latter 
into minor heavens.^ 

When my friend commences upon one of 
those solemn anthems, which peradventure 
struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in 
the side aisles of the dim Abbey, some five 
and thirty years since, waking a new sense, 
and putting a soul of old religion into my 
young apprehension— (whether it be that 
in which the Psalmist, weary of the perse- 
cutions of bad men, wisheth to himself 
dove's wings— or that other which, with a 
like measure of sobriety and pathos, in- 
quireth by what means the young man shall 
best cleanse his mind)— a holy calm per- 
vadeth me.— I am for the time 

—rapt above earth, 
And possess joys not promised at my birtli. 

But when this master of the spell, not 
content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes 
on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than 
lies in her capacity to receive— impatient 
to overcome her " earthly " with his " hea- 
venly,"^ still pouring in, for protracted 
hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea 

1 I have been there, and still would go — 
'T is like a little heaven below.— Db. Watts. 

95 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



of sound, or from that inexhausted German 
ocean, above which, in triumphant progress, 
dolphin-seated, ride those Arions Haydn 
and Mozart, with their attendant Tritons, 
BachfBeethoven, and a countless tribe, whom 
to attempt to reckon up would but plunge 
me again in the deeps,— I stagger under the 
weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my 
wits' end;— clouds, as of frankincense, op- 
press me— priests, altars, censers, dazzle 
before me— the genius of his religion hath 
me in her toils— a shadowy triple tiara in- 
vests the brow of my friend, late so naked, 
so ingenuous— he is Pope,— and by him sits, 
like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she- 
Pope too,— tricoronated like himself!— I 
am converted, and yet a Protestant;— at 
once malleus hereticorum, and myself grand 
heresiarch: or three heresies center in my 
person:— I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerin- 
thus— Gog and Magog— what not?— till the 
coming in of the friendly supper-tray dis- 
sipates the figment, and a draught of true 
Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend 
shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles 
me to the rationalities of a purer faith; and 
restores to me the genuine unterrifying 
aspects of my pleasant-countenanced host 
and hostess. 



96 



ALL FOOLS' DAY 



THE compliments of the season to my 
worthy masters, and a merry first of 
April to us all! 
Many happy returns of this day to you— 
and you— and you, Sir— nay, never frown, 
man, nor put a long face upon the matter. 
Do not we know one another? what need of 
ceremony among friends? we have all a 
touch of that same— you understand me— a 
speck of the motley. Beshrew the man 
who on such a day as this, tYie general festi- 
val, should affect to stand aloof. I am none 
of those sneakers. I am free of the cor- 
poration, and care not who knows it. He 
that meets me in the forest to-day, shall 
meet with no wiseacre, I can tell him. 
Stultus sum. Translate me that, and take 
the meaning of it to yourself for your pains. 
What! man, we have four quarters of the 
globe on our side, at the least computation. 
Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry 
—we will drink no wise, melancholy, politic 
port on this day— and let us troll the catch 
' 97 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



of Amiens— due ad me— due ad me— how 
goes it? 

Here shall lie see 

Gross fools as he. 

Now would I give a trifle to know, his- 
torically and authentically, who was the 
greatest fool that ever lived. I would cer- 
tainly give him in a bumper. Marry, of the 
present breed, I think I could without much 
difficulty name you the party. 

Remove your cap a little further, if you 
please: it hides my bauble. And now each 
man bestride his hobby, and dust away his 
bells to what tune he pleases. I will give 
you, for my part, 

—The crazy old church clock, 
And the bewildered chimes. 

Good master Empedocles, you are wel- 
come. It is long since you went a salaman- 
der-gathering down ^tna. Worse than 
samphire-picking by some odds. 'T is a 
mercy your worship did not singe your 
mustachios. 

Ha! Cleombrotus! and what salads in 
faith did you light upon at the bottom of 
the Mediterranean? You were founder, I 
take it, of the disinterested sect of the 
Calenturists. 

98 



ALL FOOLS' DAY 



Gebir, my old freemason, and prince of 
plasterers at Babel, bring in your trowel, 
most Ancient Grand! You have claim to 
a seat here at my right hand, as patron of 
the stammerers. You left your work, if I 
remember Herodotus correctly, at eight 
hundred million toises, or thereabout, above 
the level of the sea. Bless us, what a long 
bell you must have pulled, to call your top 
workmen to their nuncheon on the low 
grounds of Shinar. Or did you send up your 
garlic and onions by a rocket? I am a rogue 
if I am not ashamed to show you our Monu- 
ment on Fish-street Hill, after your alti- 
tudes. Yet we think it somewhat. 

What, the magnanimous Alexander in 
tears?— cry, baby, put its finger in its eye, 
it shall have another globe, round as an 
orange, pretty moppet! 

Mister Adams— 'odso, I honor your coat 
—pray do us the favor to read to us that 
sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slipslop 
—the twenty and second in your portman- 
teau there— on Female Incontinence— the 
same— it will come in most irrelevantly and 
impertinently seasonable to the time of the 
day. 

Good Master Raymund Lully, you look 
wise. Pray correct that error.— 

Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine 
99 



L.:! 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



you a bumper, or a paradox. We will have 
nothing said or done syllogistically this day. 
Remove those logical forms, waiter, that no 
gentleman break the tender shins of his ap- 
prehension stumbling across them. 

Master Stephen, you are late.— Ha! Cokes, 
is it you?— Aguecheek, my dear knight, let 
me pay my devoir to you.— Master Shallow, 
your worship's poor servant to command. 
—Master Silence, I will use few words with 
you.— Slender, it shall go hard if I edge not 
you in somewhere.— You six will engross all 
the poor wit of the company to-day.— I know 
it, I know it. 

Ha! honest R , my fine old Librarian 

of Ludgate, time out of mind, art thou here 
again? Bless thy doublet, it is not over- 
new, threadbare as thy stories:— what dost 
thou flitting about the world at this rate? 
—Thy customers are extinct, defunct, bed- 
rid, have ceased to read long ago.— Thou 
goest still among them, seeing if, peradven- 
ture, thou canst hawk a volume or two.— 

Good Granville S , thy last patron, is 

flown. 

King Pandion, he is dead, 

All thy friends are lapt in lead. — 

Nevertheless, noble R , come in, and 

take your seat here, between Armado and 
100 



ALL FOOLS' DAY 



Quisada; for in true courtesy, in gravity, in 
fantastic smiling to thyself, in courteous 
smiling upon others, in the goodly ornature 
of well-appareled speech, and the commen- 
dation of wise sentences, thou art nothing 
inferior to those accomplished Dons of 
Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me 
forever, when I forget thy singing the 
song of Macheath, which declares that he 
might be happy with ei^/ier, situated between 
those two ancient spinsters— when I forget 
the inimitable formal love which thou didst 
make, turning now to the one, and now to 
the other, with that Malvolian smile— as if 
Cervantes, not Gay, had written it for his 
hero; and as if thousands of periods must 
revolve, before the mirror of courtesy could 
have given his invidious preference between 
a pair of so goodly-propertied and meritori- 
ous-equal damsels. * * * 

To descend from these altitudes, and not 
to protract our Fools' Banquet beyond its 
appropriate day,— for I fear the second of 
April is not many hours distant— in sober 
verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. 
I love a Fool— as naturally as if I were of 
kith and kin to him. When a child, with 
childlike apprehensions, that dived not 
below the surface of the matter, I read 
those Parables— not guessing at the in- 
101 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



volved wisdom— I had more yearnings to- 
wards that simple architect, that built his 
house upon the sand, than I entertained for 
his more cautious neighbor: I grudged at 
the hard censure pronounced upon the quiet 
soul that kept his talent; and— prizing their 
simplicity beyond the more provident, and, 
to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine 
wariness of their competitors— I felt a kind- 
liness, that almost amounted to a tendre, 
for those five thoughtless virgins.— I have 
never made an acquaintance since, that 
lasted: or a friendship, that answered; with 
any that had not some tincture of the ab- 
surd in their characters. I venerate an 
honest obliquity of understanding. The 
more laughable blunders a man shall com- 
mit in your company, the more tests he 
giveth you, that he will not betray or over- 
reach you. I love the safety which a pal- 
pable hallucination warrants; the security 
which a word out of season ratifies. And 
take my word for this, reader, and say a 
fool told it you, if you please, that he who 
hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, 
hath pounds of much worse matter in his 
composition. It is observed, that "the 
foolisher the fowl or fish,— woodcocks,— 
dotterels— cods'-heads, etc., the finer the 
fl^sh thereof," and what are commonly the 
102 



ALL FOOLS' DAY 



world's received fools but such whereof the 
world is not worthy? and what have been 
some of the kindliest patterns of our 
species, but so many darlings of absurdity, 
minions of the goddess, and her white 
boys?— Reader, if you wrest my words be- 
yond their fair construction, it is you, and 
not I, that are the April Fool. 



103 



A QUAKERS' MEETING 



still-born Silence ! thou that art 

Flood-gate of the deeper heart ! 

Offspring of a heavenly kind ! 

Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind I 

Secrecy's confidant, and he 

Who makes religion mystery ! 

Admiration's speaking'st tongue! 

Leave, thy desert shades among. 

Reverend hermit's hallow'd cells. 

Where retired devotion dwells ! 

With thy enthusiasms come, 

Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb ! i 



READER, would'st thou know what 
true peace and quiet mean; would'st 
' thou find a refuge from the noises 
and clamors of the multitude; would'st thou 
enjoy at once solitude and society; would'st 
thou possess the depth of thine own spirit 
in stillness, without being shut out from 
the consolatory faces of thy species; 
would'st thou be alone and yet accompanied; 
solitary, yet not desolate; singular, yet not 
without some to keep thee in countenance; 
a unit in aggregate; a simple in composite: 
—come with me into a Quakers' Meeting. 
Dost thou love silence deep as that "be- 

1 From "Poems of all sorts," by Richard Flecknoe, 1653. 

104 



A QUAKERS' MEETING 

fore the winds were made "? go not out into 
the wilderness, descend not into the pro- 
fundities of the earth; shut not up thy case- 
ments; nor pour wax into the httle cells of 
thy ears, with little-f aith'd self-mistrusting 
Ulysses.— Retire with me into a Quakers' 
Meeting. 

For a man to refrain even from good 
words, and to hold his peace, it is com- 
mendable; but for a multitude it is great 
mastery. 

What is the stillness of the desert com- 
pared with this place? what the uncom- 
municating muteness of fishes?— here the 
goddess reigns and revels.— "Boreas, and 
Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with 
their interconfounding uproars more aug- 
ment the brawl— nor the waves of the blown 
Baltic with their clubbed sounds— than 
their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is 
multiplied and rendered more intense by 
numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath 
her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation 
itself hath a positive more and less; and 
closed eyes would seem to obscure the great 
obscurity of midnight. 

There are wounds which an imperfect 

solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I mean 

that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The 

perfect is that which he can sometimes 

105 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely 
as in a Quakers' Meeting.— Those first her- 
mits did certainly understand this principle, 
when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, 
not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one an- 
other's want of conversation. The Car- 
thusian is bound to his brethren by this 
agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In 
secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be 
reading a book through a long winter even- 
ing, with a friend sitting by— say, a wife— 
he, or she, too (if that be probable), reading 
another without interruption or oral com- 
munication?— can there be no sympathy 
without the gabble of words?— away with 
this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cav- 
ern-haunting solitariness. Give me. Mas- 
ter Zimmermann, a sympathetic solitude. 

To pace alone in the cloisters or side 
aisles of some cathedral, time-stricken; 

Or under hanging mountains, 
Or by the fall of fountains ; 

is but a vulgar luxury compared with that 
which those enjoy who come together for 
the purposes of more complete, abstracted 
solitude. This is the loneliness " to be felt." 
—The Abbey Church of Westminster hath 
nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as 
106 



A QUAKERS' MEETING 

the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' 
Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscrip- 
tions. 

—Sands, ignoble things, 

Dropt from the ruined sides of kings— 

but here is something which throws An- 
tiquity herself into the foreground— Si- 
lence— eldest of things— language of old 
Night— primitive Discourser— to which the 
insolent decays of moldering grandeur have 
but arrived by a violent, and, as we may 
say, unnatural progression. 

How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, 
Looking tranquillity ! 

Nothing-plotting, naught-caballing, un- 
mischievous synod! convocation without in- 
trigue! parliament without debate! what a 
lesson dost thou read to council, and to 
consistory!— if my pen treat of you lightly 
—as haply it will wander— yet my spirit 
hath gravely felt the wisdom of your cus- 
tom, when, sitting among you in deepest 
peace, which some outwelling tears would 
rather confirm than disturb, I have re- 
verted to the times of your beginnings, and 
the sowings of the seed by Pox and Dewes- 
bury.— I have witnessed that which brought 
107 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, in- 
flexible to the rude jests and serious vio- 
lences of the insolent soldiery, republican 
or royalist, sent to molest you— for ye sate 
betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the 
outcast and offscouring of church and 
presbytery.— I have seen the reeling sea- 
ruffian, who had wandered into your re- 
ceptacle with the avowed intention of dis- 
turbing your quiet, from the very spirit of 
the place receive in a moment a new heart, 
and presently sit among ye as a lamb 
amidst lambs. And I remember Penn be- 
fore his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, 
where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells 
us, and " the Judge and the Jury became as 
dead men under his feet." 

Reader, if you are not acquainted with 
it, I would recommend to you, above all 
church-narratives, to read Sewel's History 
of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the 
abstract of the journals of Fox and the 
primitive Friends. It is far more edifying 
and affecting than anything you will read of 
Wesley and his colleagues. Here is no- 
thing to stagger you, nothing to make you 
mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or 
dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. 
You will here read the true story of that 
much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps 
108 



A QUAKERS' MEETING 

hath been a byword in your mouth)— James 
Naylor : what dreadful sufferings, with what 
patience, he endured, even to the boring 
through of his tongue with red-hot irons, 
without a murmur; and with what strength 
of mind, when the delusion he had fallen 
into, which they stigmatized for blasphemy, 
had given way to clearer thoughts, he could 
renounce his error, in a strain of the beau- 
tifulest humility, yet keep his first grounds, 
and be a Quaker still!— so different from 
the practice of your common converts from 
enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize, 
apostatize all, and think they can never get 
far enough from the society of their former 
errors, even to the renunciation of some 
saving truths, with which they had been 
mingled, not implicated. 

Get the writings of John Woolman by 
heart; and love the early Quakers. 

How far the followers of these good men 
in our days have kept to the primitive 
spirit, or in what proportion they have 
substituted formality for it, the Judge of 
Spirits can alone determine. I have seen 
faces in their assemblies upon which the 
dove sate visibly brooding. Others, again, I 
have watched, when my thoughts should 
have been better engaged, in which I could 
possibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. 
109 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



But quiet was in all, and the disposition to 
unanimity, and the absence of the fierce 
controversial workings.— If the spiritual 
pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at 
least they make few pretenses. Hypocrites 
they certainly are not, in their preaching. 
It is seldom, indeed, that you shall see one 
get up amongst them to hold forth. Only 
now and then a trembling, female, gener- 
ally ancient, voice is heard— you cannot 
guess from what part of the meeting it 
proceeds— with a low, buzzing, musical 
sound, laying out a few words which "she 
thought might suit the condition of some 
present," with a quaking diffidence, which 
leaves no possibility of supposing that any- 
thing of female vanity was mixed up, where 
the tones were so full of tenderness, and a 
restraining modesty.— The men, for what I 
have observed, speak seldomer. 

Once only, and it was some years ago, I 
witnessed a sample of the old Foxian or- 
gasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, 
as Wordsworth phrases it, might have 
danced "from head to foot equipt in iron 
mail." His frame was of iron too. But he 
was malleable. I saw him shake all over 
with the spirit— I dare not say of delusion. 
The strivings of the outer man were unut- 
terable—he seemed not to speak, but to be 
110 



A QUAKERS' MEETING 



spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed 
down, and his knees to fail— his joints all 
seemed loosening— it was a figure to set oflf 
against Paul preaching— the words he ut- 
tered were few, and sound— he was evi- 
dently resisting his will— keeping down his 
own word-wisdom with more mighty effort 
than the world's orators strain for theirs. 
" He had been a WIT in his youth," he told 
us, with expressions of a sober remorse. 
And it was not till long after the impression 
had begun to wear away, that I was en- 
abled, with something like a smile, to recall 
the striking incongruity of the confession — 
understanding the term in its worldly ac- 
ceptation — with the frame and physiognomy 
of the person before me. His brow would 
have scared away the Levities— the Jocos 
Risus-que— faster than the Loves fled the 
face of Dis at Enna.— By wit, even in his 
youth, I will be sworn he understood some- 
thing far within the limits of an allowable 
liberty. 

More frequently the Meeting is broken 
up without a word having been spoken. 
But the mind has been fed. You go away 
with a sermon not made with hands. You 
have been in the milder caverns of Tro- 
phonius; or as in some den, where that 
fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, 
111 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



the Tongue, that unruly member, has 
strangely lain tied up and captive. You 
have bathed with stillness.— 0, when the 
spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness 
of the j anglings and nonsense-noises of the 
world, what a balm and a solace it is to go 
and seat yourself for a quiet half -hour upon 
some undisputed corner of a bench, among 
the gentle Quakers! 

Their garb and stillness conjoined, pre- 
sent a uniformity, tranquil and herd-like 
—as in the pasture— "forty feeding like 
one."— 

The very garments of a Quaker seem in- 
capable of receiving a soil; and cleanliness 
in them to be something more than the 
absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress 
is a lily; and when they come up in bands 
to their Whitsun conferences, whitening 
the easterly streets of the metropolis, from 
all parts of the United Kingdom, they show 
like troops of the Shining Ones. 



112 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 
SCHOOLMASTER 



MY reading has been lamentably des- 
ultory and immethodical. Odd, out- 
of-the-way, old English plays, and 
treatises, have supplied me with most of 
my notions, and ways of feeling. In every- 
thing that relates to science, I am a whole 
Encyclopedia behind the rest of the world. 
I should have scarcely cut a figure among 
the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King 
John's days. I know less geography than 
a school-boy of six weeks' standing. To me 
a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as 
Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout 
Africa merges into Asia; whether Ethiopia 
lie in one or other of those great divisions; 
nor can form the remotest conjecture of 
the position of New South Wales, or Van 
Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspon- 
dence with a very dear friend in the first- 
named of these two Terras Incognitse. I 
have no astronomy. I do not know where 
to look for the Bear, or Charles's Wain; the 
place of any star; or the name of any of 
them at sight. I guess at Venus only by 
« 113 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



her brightness— and if the sun on some por- 
tentous morn were to make his first appear- 
ance in the West, I verily beheve, that, 
while all the world were gasping in appre- 
hension about me, I alone should stand un- 
terrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of 
observation. Of history and chronology I 
possess some vague points, such as one can- 
not help picking up in the course of miscel- 
laneous study; but I never deliberately sat 
down to a chronicle, even of my own coun- 
try. I have most dim apprehensions of the 
four great monarchies; and sometimes the 
Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as 
first in my fancy. I make the widest con- 
jectures concerning Egypt, and her shep- 
herd kings. My friend M., with great pains- 
taking, got me to think I understood the 
first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over 
in despair at the second. I am entirely 
unacquainted with the modern languages; 
and, like a better man than myself, have 
"small Latin and less Greek." I am a 
stranger to the shapes and texture of the 
commonest trees, herbs, flowers— not from 
the circumstance of my being town-born— 
for I should have brought the same inob- 
servant spirit into the world with me, had 
I first seen it "on Devon's leafy shores,"— 
and am no less at a loss among purely town 
114 



OLD AND NEW SCHOOLMASTER 

objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes^ 
—Not that I affect ignorance— but my head 
has not many mansions, nor spacious; and 
I have been obliged to fill it with such cab- 
inet curiosities as it can hold without ach- 
ing. I sometimes wonder how I have passed 
my probation with so little discredit in the 
world, as I have done, upon so meager a 
stock. But the fact is, a man may do very 
well with a very little knowledge, and scarce 
be found out, in mixed company; everybody 
is so much more ready to produce his own, 
than to call for a display of your acquisi- 
tions. But in a tete-d-tete there is no 
shuffling. The truth will out. There is 
nothing which I dread so much, as the being 
left alone for a quarter of an hour with a 
sensible, well-informed man, that does not 
know me. I lately got into a dilemma of 
this sort.— 

In one of my daily jaunts between Bish- 
opsgate and Shacklewell, the coach stopped 
to take up a staid-looking gentleman, about 
the wrong side of thirty, who was giving his 
parting directions (while the steps were 
adjusting), in a tone of mild authority, to a 
tall youth, who seemed to be neither his 
clerk, his son, nor his servant, but some- 
thing partaking of all three. The youth 
was dismissed, and we drove on. As we 
115 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



were the sole passengers, he naturally- 
enough addressed his conversation to me; 
and we discussed the merits of the fare; 
the civility and punctuality of the driver; 
the circumstance of an opposition coach 
having been lately set up, with the proba- 
bilities of its success— to all which I was 
enabled to return pretty satisfactory an- 
swers, having been drilled into this kind of 
etiquette by some years' daily practice of 
riding to and fro in the stage aforesaid — 
when he suddenly alarmed me by a star- 
tling question, whether I had seen the show 
of prize cattle that morning in Smithfield? 
Now, as I had not seen it, and do not greatly 
care for such sort of exhibitions, I was 
obliged to return a cold negative. He 
seemed a little mortified, as well as aston- 
ished, at my declaration, as (it appeared) he 
was just come fresh from the sight, and 
doubtless had hoped to compare notes on 
the subject. However, he assured me that 
I had lost a fine treat, as it far exceeded 
the show of last year. We were now ap- 
proaching Norton Polgate, when the sight 
of some shop-goods ticketed freshened him 
up into a dissertation upon the cheapness 
of cottons this spring. I was now a little 
in heart, as the nature of my morning avoca- 
tions had brought me into some sort of 
116 



OLD AND NEW SCHOOLMASTER 

familiarity with the raw material; and I was 
surprised to find how eloquent I was becom- 
ing on the state of the India market; when, 
presently, he dashed my incipient vanity to 
the earth at once, by inquiring whether I 
had ever made any calculation as to the 
value of the rental of all the retail shops in 
London. Had he asked of me what song 
the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles 
assumed when he hid himself among women, 
I might, with Sir Thomas Browne, have 
hazarded a " wide solution." ■^ My compan- 
ion saw my embarrassment, and, the alms- 
houses beyond Shoreditch just coming in 
view, with great good-nature and dexterity 
shifted his conversation to the subject of 
public charities; which led to the compara- 
tive merits of provision for the poor in past 
and present times, with observations on the 
old monastic institutions, and charitable 
orders; but, finding me rather dimly im- 
pressed with some glimmering notions from 
old poetic associations, than strongly forti- 
fied with any speculations reducible to cal- 
culation on the subject, he gave the matter 
up; and, the country beginning to open 
more and more upon us, as we approached 
the turnpike at Kingsland (the destined 
termination of his journey), he put a home 

1 Urn Burial. 

117 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



thrust upon me, in the most unfortunate 
position he could have chosen, by advan- 
cing some queries relative to the North Pole 
Expedition. While I was muttering out 
something about the Panorama of those 
strange regions (which I had actually seen), 
by way of parrying the question, the coach 
stopping relieved me from any further ap- 
prehensions. My companion getting out, 
left me in the comfortable possession of my 
ignorance; and I heard him, as he went off, 
putting questions to an outside passenger, 
who had alighted with him, regarding an 
epidemic disorder that had been rife about 
Dalston, and which my friend assured him 
had gone through five or six schools in that 
neighborhood. The truth now flashed upon 
me, that my companion was a schoolmas- 
ter; and that the youth, whom he had 
parted from at our first acquaintance, must 
have been one of the bigger boys, or the 
usher.— He was evidently a kind-hearted 
man, who did not seem so much desirous of 
provoking discussion by the questions which 
he put, as of obtaining information at any 
rate. It did not appear that he took any 
interest, either, in such kind of inquiries, 
for their own sake; but that he was in some 
way bound to seek for knowledge. A green- 
ish-colored coat, which he had on, forbade 
118 



OLD AND NEW SCHOOLMASTER 

me to surmise that he was a clergyman. 
The adventure gave birth to some reflec- 
tions on the difference between persons of 
his profession in past and present times. 

Rest to the souls of those fine old Peda- 
gogues; the breed, long since extinct, of the 
Lilys and the Linacres: who believing that 
all learning was contained in the languages 
which they taught, and despising every 
other acquirement as superficial and use- 
less, came to their task as to a sport! 
Passing from infancy to age, they dreamed 
away all their days as in a grammar school. 
Revolving in a perpetual cycle of declen- 
sions, conjugations, syntaxes, and proso- 
dies; renewing constantly the occupations 
which had charmed their studious child- 
hood; rehearsing continually the part of 
the past; life must have slipped from them 
at last like one day. They were always in 
their first garden, reaping harvests of their 
golden time, among their Flori- and their 
Spiei-legia; in Arcadia still, but kings; the 
ferule of their sway not much harsher, but 
of like dignity with that mild scepter at- 
tributed to king Basileus; the Greek and 
Latin, their stately Pamela and their Philo- 
clea; with the occasional duncery of some 
untoward tyro, serving for a refreshing 
interlude of a Mopsa, or a clown Damoetas! 
119 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



With what a savor doth the Preface to 
Colet's, or (as it is sometimes called) Paul's 
Accidence, set forth! "To exhort every 
man to the learning of grammar, that in- 
tendeth to attain the understanding of the 
tongues, wherein is contained a great trea- 
sury of wisdom and knowledge, it would 
seem but vain and lost labour; for so much 
as it is known, that nothing can surely be 
ended, whose beginning is either feeble or 
faulty; and no building be perfect whereas 
the foundation and groundwork is ready to 
fall, and unable to uphold the burden of the 
frame." How well doth this stately pre- 
amble (comparable to those which Milton 
commendeth as " having been the usage to 
prefix to some solemn law, then first pro- 
mulgated by Solon or Lycurgus") corre- 
spond with and illustrate that pious zeal 
for conformity, expressed in a succeeding 
clause, which would fence about grammar- 
rules with the severity of faith-articles!— 
" as for the diversity of grammars, it is well 
profitably taken away by the King's Majes- 
ties wisdom, who foreseeing the inconve- 
nience, and favourably providing the reme- 
die, caused one kind of grammar by sundry 
learned men to be diligently drawn, and so 
to be set out, only everywhere to be taught 
for the use of learners, and for the hurt in 
120 



OLD AND NEW SCHOOLMASTER 

changing of schoolmaisters." What a gusto 
in that which follows: "wherein it is profit- 
able that he [the pupil] can orderly decline 
his noun and his verb." His noun ! 

The fine dream is fading away fast; and 
the least concern of a teacher in the present 
day is to inculcate grammar-rules. 

The modern schoolmaster is expected to 
know a little of everything, because his 
pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant 
of anything. He must be superficially, if I 
may so say, omniscient. He is to know 
something of pneumatics; of chemistry; of 
whatever is curious or proper to excite the 
attention of the youthful mind; an insight 
into mechanics is desirable, with a touch of 
statistics; the quality of soils, etc., botany, 
the constitution of his country, cum multis 
aliis. You may get a notion of some part 
of his expected duties by consulting the 
famous Tractate on Education, addressed to 
Mr. Hartlib. 

All these things— these, or the desire of 
them— he is expected to instil, not by set 
lessons from professors, which he may 
charge in the bill, but at school intervals, 
as he walks the streets, or saunters through 
green fields (those natural instructors), with 
his pupils. The least part of what is ex- 
pected from him is to be done in school 
121 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



hours. He must insinuate knowledge at 
the mollia tempora fandi. He must seize 
every occasion— the season of the year— the 
time of the day— a passing cloud— a rain- 
bow—a wagon of hay— a regiment of sol- 
diers going by— to inculcate something 
useful. He can receive no pleasure from a 
casual glimpse of Nature, but must catch 
at it as an object of instruction. He must 
interpret beauty into the picturesque. He 
cannot relish a beggar-man, or a gipsy, for 
thinking of the suitable improvement. 
Nothing comes to him, not spoiled by the 
sophisticating medium of moral uses. The 
Universe— that Great Book, as it has been 
called— is to him, indeed, to all intents and 
purposes, a book out of which he is doomed 
to read tedious homilies to distasting school- 
boys.— Vacations themselves are none to 
him, he is only rather worse off than before; 
for commonly he has some intrusive upper- 
boy fastened upon him at such times; some 
cadet of a great family; some neglected lump 
of nobility, or gentry; that he must drag 
after him to the play, to the Panorama, to 
Mr. Hartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon, or 
into the country, to a friend's house, or his 
favorite watering-place. Wherever he goes 
this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is 
at his board, and in his path, and in all his 
122 



\ 



OLD AND NEW SCHOOLMASTER 

movements. He is boy-rid, sick of per- 
petual boy. 

Boys are capital fellows in their own way, 
among their mates; but they are unwhole- 
some companions for grown people. The 
restraint is felt no less on the one side than 
on the other.— Even a child, that "plaything 
for an hour," tires always. The noises of 
children, playing their own fancies— as I 
now harken to them, by fits, sporting on 
the green before my window, while I am 
engaged in these grave speculations at my 
neat suburban retreat at Shacklewell— by 
distance made more sweet— inexpressibly 
take from the labor of my task. It is like 
writing to music. They seem to modulate 
my periods. They ought at least to do so 
—for in the voice of that tender age there 
is a kind of poetry, far unlike the harsh 
prose-accents of man's conversation.— I 
should but spoil their sport, and diminish 
my own sympathy for them, by mingling in 
their pastime. 

I would not be domesticated all my days 
with a person of very superior capacity to 
my own— not, if I know myself at all, from 
any considerations of Jealousy or self-com- 
parison, for the occasional communion with 
such minds has constituted the fortune and 
felicity of my life— but the habit of too con- 
123 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



stant intercourse with spirits above yo"u, 
instead of raising you, keeps you down. Too 
frequent doses of original thinking from 
others restrain what lesser portion of that 
faculty you may possess of your own. You 
get entangled in another man's mind, even 
as you lose yourself in another man's 
grounds. You are walking with a tall var- 
let, whose strides outpace yours to lassi- 
tude. The constant operation of such 
potent agency would reduce me, I am con- 
vinced, to imbecility. You may derive 
thoughts from others; your way of think- 
ing, the mold in which your thoughts are 
cast, must be your own. Intellect may be 
imparted, but not each man's intellectual 
frame. — 

As little as I should wish to be always 
thus dragged upward, as little (or rather 
still less) is it desirable to be stunted down- 
wards by your associates. The trumpet 
does not more stun you by its loudness, 
than a whisper teases you by its provoking 
inaudibility. 

Why are we never quite at our ease in 
the presence of a schoolmaster?— because 
we are conscious that he is not quite at his 
ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of 
place in the society of his equals. He comes 
like Gulliver from among his little people, 
124 



OLD AND NEW SCHOOLMASTER 



and he cannot fit the stature of his under- 
standing to yours. He cannot meet you on 
the square. He wants a point given him, 
like an indifferent whist-player. He is so 
used to teaching, that he wants to be teach- 
ing you. One of these professors, upon my 
complaining that these little sketches of 
mine were anything but methodical, and 
that I was unable to make them otherwise, 
kindly offered to instruct me in the method 
by which young gentlemen in his seminary 
were taught to compose English themes.— 
The jests of a schoolmaster are coarse, or 
thin. They do not tell out of school. He 
is under the restraint of a formal or didac- 
tive hypocrisy in company, as a clergyman 
is under a moral one. He can no more let 
his intellect loose in society than the other 
can his inclinations. He is forlorn among 
his coevals; his juniors cannot be his 
friends. 

" I take blame to myself," said a sensible 
man of this profession, writing to a friend 
respecting a youth who had quitted his 
school abruptly, " that your nephew was not 
more attached to me. But persons in my 
situation are more to be pitied than can 
well be imagined. We are surrounded by 
young, and, consequently, ardently affec- 
tionate hearts, but we can never hope to 
125 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



Siiare an atom of their affections. The re- 
lation of master and scholar forbids this. 
How pleasing this must be to you, how I envy 
your feelings ! my friends will sometimes 
say to me, when they see young men whom 
I have educated, return after some years' 
absence from school, their eyes shining 
with pleasure, while they shake hands with 
their old master, bringing a present of game 
to me, or a toy to my wife, and thanking 
me in the warmest terms for my care of 
their education. A holiday is begged for 
the boys; the house is a scene of happiness; 
I, only, am sad at heart.— This fine-spirited 
and warm-hearted youth, who fancies he 
repays his master with gratitude for the 
care of his boyish years— this young man- 
in the eight long years I watched over him 
with a parent's anxiety, never could repay 
me with one look of genuine feeling. He 
was proud, when I praised; he was submis- 
sive, when I reproved him; but he did never 
love me— and what he now mistakes for 
gratitude and kindness for me, is but the 
pleasant sensation which all persons feel at 
revisiting the scenes of their boyish hopes 
and fears; and the seeing on equal terms 
the man they were accustomed to look up 
to with reverence. My wife, too," this in- 
teresting correspondent goes on to say, " my 
126 



OLD AND NEW SCHOOLMASTER 

once darling Anna, is the wife of a school- 
master.— When I married her— knowing 
that the wife of a schoolmaster ought to be 
a busy, notable creature, and fearing that 
my gentle Anna would ill supply the loss of 
my dear bustling mother, just then dead, 
who never sat still, was in every part of 
the house in a moment, and whom I was 
obliged sometimes to threaten to fasten 
down in a chair, to save her from fatiguing 
herself to death— I expressed my fears that 
I was bringing her into a way of life unsuit- 
able to her; and she, who loved me tenderly, 
promised for my sake to exert herself to 
perform the duties of her new situation. 
She promised, and she has kept her word. 
What wonders will not woman's love per- 
form?— My house is managed with a pro- 
priety and decorum unknown in other 
schools; my boys are well fed, look healthy, 
and have every proper accommodation; and 
all this performed with a careful economy, 
that never descends to meanness. But I 
have lost my gentle helpless Anna! When 
we sit down to enjoy an hour of repose after 
the fatigue of the day, I am compelled to 
listen to what have been her useful (and 
they are really useful) employments through 
the day, and what she proposes for her to- 
morrow's task. Her heart and her features 
127 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



are changed by the duties of her situation. 
To the boys, she never appears other than 
the master's wife, and she looks up to me 
as the boys' master ; to whom all show of 
love and affection would be highly improper, 
and unbecoming the dignity of her situation 
and mine. Yet this my gratitude forbids 
me to hint to her. For my sake she sub- 
mitted to be this altered creature, and can 
I reproach her for it?"— For the communi- 
cation of this letter I am indebted to my 
cousin Bridget. 



128 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 



I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympa- 
thizeth with all things ; I have no antipathy, or rather idio- 
syncrasy in anything. Those natural repugnancies do not 
touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, 
Spaniard, or Dutch. — Beligio Medici. 



THAT the author of the Religio Medici 
mounted upon the airy stilts of ab- 
straction, conversant about notional 
and conjectural essences; in whose cate- 
gories of Being the possible took the upper 
hand of the actual; should have overlooked 
the impertinent individualities of such poor 
concretions as mankind, is not much to be 
admired. It is rather to be wondered at, 
that in the genus of animals he should have 
condescended to distinguish that species at 
all. For myself— earth-bound and fettered 
to the scene of my activities, — 

Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky, 

I confess that I do feel the differences of 
mankind, national or individual, to an un- 
healthy excess.- I can look with no indiffer- 
ent eye upon things or persons. Whatever 
is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste; or 
3 129 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



when once it becomes indifferent it begins 
to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, 
a bundle of prejudices— made up of likings 
and dislikings— the veriest thrall to sym- 
pathies, apathies, antipathies. In a certain 
sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am 
a lover of my species. I can feel for all 
indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all 
equally. The more purely English word that 
expresses sympathy, will better explain my 
meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, 
who upon another account cannot be my 
mate ov fellow. I cannot like all people alike.^ 

1 I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of 
imperfect sympathies. To nations or classes of men tbere can 
be no direct antipathy. There may be individuals born and 
constellated so opposite to another individual nature, that the 
same sphere cannot hold them. I have met with my moral 
antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meeting 
(who never saw one another before in their lives) and in- 
stantly fighting. 

— We by proof find there should be 
'Twixt man and man such an antipathy. 
That though he can show no just reason why 
For any former wrong or injury, 
Can neither find a blemish in his fame, 
Nor aught in face or feature justly blame, 
Can challenge or accuse him of no evil. 
Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil. 

The lines are from old Heywood's " Hierarchic of Angels," 
and he subjoins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard 
who attempted to assassinate a king Ferdinand of Spain, and 
being put to the rack could give no other reason for the deed 
but an inveterate antipathy which he had taken to the first 
sight of the king. 

— The cause which to that act compell'd him 
Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him. 

130 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 

I have been trying all my life to like 
Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from 
the experiment in despair. They cannot 
like me — and in truth, I never knew one of 
that nation who attempted to do it. There 
is something more plain and ingenuous in 
their mode of proceeding. We know one 
another at first sight. There is an order of 
imperfect intellects (under which mine must 
be content to rank) which in its constitution 
is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners 
of the sort of faculties I allude to, have 
minds rather suggestive than comprehen- 
sive. They have no pretenses to much 
clearness or precision in their ideas, or in 
their manner of expressing them. Their 
intellectual wardrobe (to confess fairly) has 
few whole pieces in it. They are content 
with fragments and scattered pieces of 
Truth. She presents no full front to them 
—a feature or side-face at the most. Hints 
and glimpses, germs and crude essays at 
a system, is the utmost they pretend to. 
They beat up a little game peradventure— 
and leave it to knottier heads, more robust 
constitutions, to run it down. The light 
that lights them is not steady and polar, 
but mutable and shifting: waxing, and again 
waning. Their conversation is accordingly. 
They will throw out a random word in or 
131 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



out of season, and be content to let it pass 
for what it is worth. They cannot speak 
always as if they were upon their oath— but 
must be understood, speaking or writing, 
with some abatement. They seldom wait 
to mature a proposition, but e'en bring it to 
market in the green ear. They delight to 
impart their defective discoveries as they 
arise, without waiting for their full develop- 
ment. They are no systematizers, and 
would but err more by attempting it. Their 
minds, as I said before, are suggestive 
merely. The brain of a true Caledonian (if 
I am not mistaken) is constituted upon 
quite a different plan. His Minerva is born 
in panoply. You are never admitted to see 
his ideas in their growth— if, indeed, they 
do grow, and are not rather put together 
upon principles of clockwork. You never 
catch his mind in an undress. He never 
hints or suggests anything, but unlades his 
stock of ideas in perfect order and complete- 
ness. He brings his total wealth into com- 
pany, and gravely unpacks it. His riches 
are always about him. He never stoops to 
catch a glittering something in your pres- 
ence to share it with you, before he quite 
knows whether it be true touch or not. 
You cannot cry halves to anything that he 
finds. He does not find, but bring. You 
132 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 



never witness his first apprehension of a 
thing. His understanding is always at its 
meridian— you never see the first dawn, the 
early streaks.— He has no falterings of self- 
suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, 
half-intuitions, semi-consciousnesses, par- 
tial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo 
conceptions, have no place in his brain or 
vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never 
falls upon him. Is he orthodox— he has no 
doubts. Is he an infidel — he has none 
either. Between the affirmative and the 
negative there is no border-land with him. 
You cannot hover with him upon the con- 
fines of truth, or wander in the maze of a 
probable argument. He always keeps the 
path. You cannot make excursions with 
him —for he sets you right. His taste never 
fluctuates. His morality never abates. He 
cannot compromise, or understand middle 
actions. There can be but a right and a 
wrong. His conversation is as a book. His 
affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. 
You must speak upon the square with him. 
He stops a metaphor like a suspected person 
in an enemy's country. " A healthy book! " 
—said one of his countrymen to me, who 
had ventured to give that appellation to 
John Buncle,— "Did I catch rightly what 
you said? I have heard of a man in health, 
133 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



and of a healthy state of body, but I do not 
see how that epithet can be properly applied 
to a book." Above all, you must beware of 
indirect expressions before a Caledonian. 
Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you 
are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Re- 
member you are upon your oath. I have a 
print of a graceful female after Leonardo da 
Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr. * * * * 
After he had examined it minutely, I ven- 
tured to ask him how he liked MY beauty 
(a foolish name it goes by among my friends) 
—when he very gravely assured me, that 
"he had considerable respect for my char- 
acter and talents" (so he was pleased to 
say), "but had not given himself much 
thought about the degree of my personal 
pretensions." The misconception stag- 
gered me, but did not seem much to dis- 
concert him.— Persons of this nation are 
particularly fond of affirming a truth— 
which nobody doubts. They do not so 
properly affirm, as annunciate it. They do 
indeed appear to have such a love of truth 
(as if, like virtue, it were valuable for 
itself) that all truth becomes equally valu- 
able, whether the proposition that contains 
it be new or old, disputed, or such as is im- 
possible to become a subject of disputation. 
I was present not long since at a party of 
134 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 

North Britons, where a son of Burns was 
expected; and happened to drop a silly ex- 
pression (in my South British way), that I 
wished it were the father instead of the son 
—when four of them started up at once to 
inform me, that "that was impossible, be- 
cause he was dead." An impracticable wish, 
it seems, was more than they could con- 
ceive. Swift has hit off this part of their 
character, namely their love of truth, in his 
biting way, but with an illiberality that 
necessarily confines the passage to the mar- 
gin.^ The tediousness of these people is 
certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever 
tire one another!— In my early life I had a 
passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. 
I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingrati- 
ate myself with his countrymen by express- 
ing it. But I have always found that a true 
Scot resents your admiration of his com- 
patriot even more than he would your con- 
tempt of him. The latter he imputes to 
your "imperfect acquaintance with many 

1 There are some people who think they sujficiently acquit 
themselves, and entertain their company, with relating facts 
of no consequence, not at all out of the road of such common 
incidents as happen every day; and this I have observed 
more frequently among the Scots than any other nation, who 
are very careful not to omit the minutest circumstances of 
time or place ; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little 
relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent 
and gesture, peculiar to that country, would be hardly toler- 
able. — Hints toioards an Essay on Conversation. 

135 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



of the words which he uses "; and the same 
objection makes it a presumption in you to 
suppose that you can admire him.— Thom- 
son they seem to have forgotten. Smollett 
they have neither forgotten nor forgiven, 
for his delineation of Rory and his compan- 
ion, upon their first introduction to our 
metropolis.— Speak of Smollett as a great 
genius, and they will retort upon you 
Hume's History compared with his Con- 
tinuation of it. What if the historian had 
continued Humphrey Clinker? 

I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for 
Jews. They are a piece of stubborn an- 
tiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is 
in its nonage. They date beyond the pyra- 
mids. But I should not care to be in habits 
of familiar intercourse with any of that na- 
tion. I confess that I have not the nerves 
to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices 
cling about me. I cannot shake off the 
story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of in- 
jury, contempt, and hate, on the one side, 
—of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and 
hate, on the other, between our and their 
fathers, must and ought to affect the blood 
of the children. I cannot believe it can run 
clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine 
words, such as candor, liberality, the light 
of a nineteenth century, can close up the 
136 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 

breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew 
is nowhere congenial to me. He is least 
distasteful on 'Change— for the mercantile 
spirit levels all distinctions, as all are 
beauties in the dark. I boldly confess that 
I do not relish the approximation of Jew 
and Christian, which has become so fash- 
ionable. The reciprocal endearments have, 
to me, something hypocritical and unnatural 
in them. I do not like to see the Church 
and Synagogue kissing and congeeing in 
awkward postures of an affected civility. If 
they are converted, why do they not come 
over to us altogether? Why keep up a form 
of separation, when the life of it is fled? 
If they can sit with us at table, why do they 
keck at our cookery? I do not understand 
these half convertites. Jews christianizing 
—Christians judaizing— puzzle me. I like 
fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more 
confounding piece of anomaly than a wet 
Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is 

essentially separative. B would have 

been more in keeping if he had abided by 
the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine 
scorn in his face, which nature meant to 

be of Christians. The Hebrew spirit is 

strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. 

He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it 

breaks out, when he sings, "The Children 

137 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



of Israel passed through the Red Sea"! 
The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyp- 
tians to him, and he rides over our necks in 
triumph. There is no mistaking him. 

B has a strong expression of sense in 

his countenance, and it is confirmed by his 
singing. The foundation of his vocal excel- 
lence is sense. He sings with understand- 
ing, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He 
would sing the Commandments, and give an 
appropriate character to each prohibition. 
His nation, in general, have not over-sensi- 
ble countenances. How should they?— but 
you' seldom see a silly expression among 
them. Gain, and the pursuit of gain, 
sharpen a man's visage. I never heard 
of an idiot being born among them.— 
Some admire the Jewish female physiog- 
nomy. I admire it— but with trembling. 
Jael had those full, dark, inscrutable 
eyes. 

In the Negro countenance you will often 
meet with strong traits of benignity. I have 
felt yearnings of tenderness towards some 
of these faces— or rather masks— that have 
looked out kindly upon one in casual en- 
counters in the streets and highways. I 
love what Fuller beautifully calls— these 
" images of God cut in ebony." But I should 
not like to associate with them, to share 
138 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 

my meals and my good nights with them— 
because they are black. 

I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. 
I venerate the Quaker principles. It does 
me good for the rest of the day when I 
meet any of their people in my path. When 
I am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, 
the sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, acts 
upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, 
and taking off a load from the bosom. But 
I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona 
would say) "to live with them." I am all 
over sophisticated— with humors, fancies, 
craving hourly sympathy. I must have 
books, pictures, theaters, chit-chat, scandal, 
jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim- 
whams, which their simpler taste can do 
without. I should starve at their primitive 
banquet. My appetites are too high for the 
salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve 
dressed for the angel; my gusto too excited 

To sit a guest witli Daniel at his pulse. 

The indirect answers which Quakers are 
often found to return to a question put to 
them may be explained, I think, without the 
vulgar assumption, that they are more given 
to evasion and equivocating than other 
people. They naturally look to their words 
139 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



more carefully, and are more cautious of 
committing themselves. They have a 
peculiar character to keep up on this head. 
They stand in a manner upon their veracity. 
A Quaker is by law exempted from taking 
an oath. The custom of resorting to an 
oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by 
all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be 
confessed) to introduce into the laxer sort 
of minds the notion of two kinds of truth— 
the one applicable to the solemn affairs of 
justice, and the other to the common pro- 
ceedings of daily intercourse. As truth 
bound upon the conscience by an oath can 
be but truth, so in the common affirmations 
of the shop and the market-place a latitude 
is expected and conceded upon questions 
wanting this solemn covenant. Something 
less than truth satisfies. It is common to 
hear a person say, "You do not expect me 
to speak as if I were upon my oath." Hence 
a great deal of incorrectness and inadver- 
tency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordi- 
nary conversation; and a kind of secondary 
or laic truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth 
—oath- truth, by the nature of the circum- 
stances, is not required. A Quaker knows 
none of this distinction. His simple affirma- 
tion being received upon the most sacred 
occasions, without any further test, stamps 
140 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 

a value upon the words which he is to use 
upon the most indifferent topics of hfe. He 
looks to them, naturally, with more severity. 
You can have of him no more than his word. 
He knows, if he is caught tripping in a 
casual expression, he forfeits, for himself at 
least, his claim to the invidious exemption. 
He knows that his syllables are weighed— 
and how far a consciousness of this particu- 
lar watchfulness, exerted against a person, 
has a tendency to produce indirect answers, 
and a diverting of the question by honest 
means, might be illustrated, and the practice 
justified by a more sacred example than is 
proper to be adduced upon this occasion. 
The admirable presence of mind, which is 
notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, 
might be traced to this imposed self-watch- 
fulness—if it did not seem rather an hum- 
ble and secular scion of that old stock of 
religious constancy, which never bent or 
faltered, in the Primitive Friends, or gave 
way to the winds of persecution, to the vio- 
lence of judge or accuser, under trials and 
racking examinations. " You will never be 
the wiser, if I sit here answering your 
questions till midnight," said one of those 
upright Justicers to Penn, who had been 
putting law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. 
"Thereafter as the answers may be," re- 
141 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



torted the Quaker. The astonishing com- 
posure of this people is sometimes ludi- 
crously displayed in lighter instances.— I 
was traveling in a stage-coach with three 
male Quakers, buttoned up in the straitest 
nonconformity of their sect. We stopped 
to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea 
apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. 
My friends confined themselves to the tea- 
table. I in my way took supper. When 
the landlady brought in the bill, the eldest 
of my companions discovered that she had 
charged for both meals. This was resisted. 
Mine hostess was very clamorous and posi- 
tive. Some mild arguments were used on 
the part of the Quakers, for which the 
heated mind of the good lady seemed by no 
means a fit recipient. The guard came in 
with his usual peremptory notice. The 
Quakers pulled out their money and for- 
mally tendered it — so much for tea — I, in 
humble imitation, tendering mine— for the 
supper which I had taken. She would not 
relax in her demand. So they all three 
quietly put up their silver, as did myself, 
and marched out of the room, the eldest 
and gravest going first, with myself closing 
up the rear, who thought I could not do 
better than follow the example of such 
grave and warrantable personages. We 
142 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 

got in. The steps went up. The coach 
drove off. The murmurs of mine hostess, 
not very indistinctly or ambiguously pro- 
nounced, became after a time inaudible— 
and now my conscience, which the whimsi- 
cal scene had for a while suspended, begin- 
ning to give some twitches, I waited, in the 
hope that some justification would be offered 
by these serious persons for the seeming in- 
justice of their conduct. To my great sur- 
prise not a syllable was dropped on the 
subject. They sat as mute as at a meeting. 
At length the eldest of them broke silence, 
by inquiring of his next neighbor, "Hast 
thee heard how indigos go at the India 
House?" and the question operated as a 
soporific on my moral feeling as far as 
Exeter. 



143 



WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT 
FEARS 



WE are too hasty when we set down 
our ancestors in the gross for 
fools, for the monstrous incon- 
sistencies (as they seem to us) involved in 
their creed of witchcraft. In the relations 
of this visible world we find them to have 
been as rational, and shrewd to detect an 
historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when 
once the invisible world was supposed to be 
open, and the lawless agency of bad spirits 
assumed, what measures of probability, of 
decency, of fitness, or proportion— of that 
which distinguishes the likely from the 
palpable absurd— could they have to guide 
them in the rejection or admission of any 
particular testimony?— That maidens pined 
away, wasting inwardly as their waxen im- 
ages consumed before a fire— that corn was 
lodged, and cattle lamed— that whirlwinds 
uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the 
forest— or that spits and kettles only danced 
a fearful-innocent vagary about some rus- 
tic's kitchen when no wind was stirring — 
were all equally probable where no law of 
144 



WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS 

agency was understood. That the prince of 
the powers of darkness, passing by the 
flower and pomp of the earth, should lay 
preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of 
indigent eld— has neither likelihood nor 
unlikelihood a priori to us, who have no 
measure to guess at his policy, or standard 
to estimate what rate those anile souls may 
fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the 
wicked are expressly symbolized by a goat, 
was it to be wondered at so much, that he 
should come sometimes in that body, and 
assert his metaphor.— That the intercourse 
was opened at all between both worlds was 
perhaps the mistake— but that once as- 
sumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one 
attested story of this nature more than 
another on the score of absurdity. There is 
no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by 
which a dream may be criticized. 

I have sometimes thought that I could not 
have existed in the days of received witch- 
craft; that I could not have slept in a village 
where one of those reputed hags dwelt. 
Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. 
Amidst the universal belief that these 
wretches were in league with the author of 
all evil, holding hell tributary to their mut- 
tering, no simple justice of the peace seems 
to have scrupled issuing, or silly headbor- 
10 145 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



ough serving, a warrant upon them— as if 
they should subpoena Satan!— Prosper© in 
his boat, with his books and wand about 
him, suffers himself to be conveyed away at 
the mercy of his enemies to an unknown 
island. He might have raised a storm or 
two, we think, on the passage. His acquies- 
cence is in exact analogy to the non-resis- 
tance of witches to the constituted powers. 
—What stops the Fiend in Spenser from 
tearing Guyon to pieces— or who had made 
it a condition of his prey that Guyon must 
take assay of the glorious bait— we have no 
guess. We do not know the laws of that 
country. 

From my childhood I was extremely in- 
quisitive about witches and witch-stories. 
My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied 
me with good store. But I shall mention 
the accident which directed my curiosity 
originally into this channel. In my father's 
book-closet the History of the Bible by 
Stackhouse occupied a distinguished station. 
The pictures with which it abounds— one of 
the ark, in particular, and another of Solo- 
mon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity 
of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist 
had been upon the spot— attracted my child- 
ish attention. There was a picture, too, of 
the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish 
146 



WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS 

that I had never seen. We shall come to 
that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge 
tomes;— and there was a pleasure in remov- 
ing folios of that magnitude, which, with 
infinite straining, was as much as I could 
manage, from the situation which they oc- 
cupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met 
with the work from that time to this, hut I 
remember it consisted of Old Testament 
stories, orderly set down, with the objection 
appended to each story, and the solution of 
the objection regularly tacked to that. The 
objection was a summary of whatever diffi- 
culties had been opposed to the credibility 
of the history by the shrewdness of ancient 
or modern infidelity, drawn up with an al- 
most complimentary excess of candor. The 
solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. 
The bane and antidote were both before you. 
To doubts so put, and so quashed, there 
seemed to be an end forever. The dragon 
lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to 
trample on. But— like as was rather feared 
than realized from that slain monster in 
Spenser— from the womb of those crushed 
errors young dragonets would creep, ex- 
ceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint 
George as myself to vanquish. The habit 
of expecting objections to every passage 
set me upon starting more objections, for 
147 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



the glory of finding a solution of my own 
for them. I became staggered and per- 
plexed, a skeptic in long coats. The pretty 
Bible stories which I had read, or heard read 
in church, lost their purity and sincerity of 
impression, and were turned into so many 
historic or chronologic theses to be defended 
against whatever impugners. I was not to 
disbelieve them, but— the next thing to 
that— I was to be quite sure that some one 
or other would or had disbelieved them. 
Next to making a child an infidel is the let- 
ting him know that there are infidels at all. 
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the 
child's strength. 0, how ugly sound scrip- 
tural doubts from the mouth of a babe and 
a suckling!— I should have lost myself in 
these mazes, and have pined away, I think, 
with such unfit sustenance as these husks 
afforded, but for a fortunate piece of ill 
fortune which about this time befell me. 
Turning over the picture of the ark with 
too much haste, I unhappily made a breach 
in its ingenious fabric— driving my incon- 
siderate fingers right through the two larger 
quadrupeds, the elephant and the camel, 
that stare (as well they might) out of the 
two last windows next the steerage in that 
unique piece of naval architecture. Stack- 
house was henceforth locked up, and be- 
148 



WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS 

came an interdicted treasure. With the 
book, the objections and solutions gradually 
cleared out of my head, and have seldom 
returned since in any force to trouble me. 
But there was one impression which I had 
imbibed from Stackhouse which no lock or 
bar could shut out, and which was destined 
to try my childish nerves rather more seri- 
ously.— That detestable picture! 

I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. 
The night-time, solitude, and the dark were 
my hell. The sufferings I endured in this na- 
ture would justify the expression. I never 
laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from 
the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of 
my life— so far as memory serves in things 
so long ago— without an assurance, which 
realized its own prophecy, of seeing some 
frightful specter. Be old Stackhouse then 
acquitted in part, if I say that to his pic- 
ture of the Witch raising up Samuel— (0 
that old man covered with a mantle!)— I 
owe— not my midnight terrors, the hell of 
my infancy— but the shape and manner of 
their visitation. It was he who dressed up 
for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pil- 
low—a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or my 
maid was far from me. All day long, while 
the book was permitted me, I dreamed wak-. 
ing over his delineation, and at night (if I 
149 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



may use so bold an expression) awoke into 
sleep, and found the vision true. I durst 
not, even in the daylight, once enter the 
chamber where I slept, without my face 
turned to the window, aversely from the bed 
where my witch-ridden pillow was. — Parents 
do not know what they do when they leave 
tender babes alone to go to sleep in the 
dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm 
— the hoping for a familiar voice— when 
they wake screaming— and find none to 
soothe them— what a terrible shaking it is 
to their poor nerves ! The keeping them up 
till midnight, through candle-light and the 
unwholesome hours, as they are called,— 
would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of 
view, prove the better caution.— That de- 
testable picture, as I have said, gave the 
fashion to my dreams— if dreams they were 
—for the scene of them was invariably the 
room in which I lay. Had I never met with 
the picture, the fears would have come self- 
pictured in some shape or other — 

Headless bear, black man, or ape— 

but, as it was, my imaginations took that 
form.— It is not book, or picture, or the 
stories of foolish servants, which create 
these terrors in children. They can at most 
150 



WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS 

but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., 
who of all children has been brought up 
with the most scrupulous exclusion of every 
taint of superstition— who was never al- 
lowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or 
scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read 
or hear of any distressing story— finds all 
this world of fear, from which he has been 
so rigidly excluded ah extra, in his own 
"thick-coming fancies "; and from his little 
midnight pillow, this nurse-child of opti- 
mism will start at shapes, unborrowed of 
tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of 
the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity. 
Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras dire 
—stories of Celseno and the Harpies— may 
reproduce themselves in the brain of super- 
stition—but they were there before. They 
are transcripts, types— the archetypes are 
in us, and eternal. How else should the 
recital of that, which we know in a waking 
sense to be false, come to affect us at all? 
—or 

—Names, whose sense we see not, 
Fray us with things that be not? 

Is it that we naturally conceive terror from 
such objects, considered in their capacity of 
being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? 
—0, least of all! These terrors are of older 
151 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



standing. They date beyond body— or, with- 
out the body, they would have been the 
same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined 
devils in Dante— tearing, mangling, chok- 
ing, stifling, scorching demons— are they 
one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as 
the simple idea of a spirit unembodied fol- 
lowing him — 

Like one that on a lonesome road 
Doth walk in fear and dread, 
And having once turn'd round, walks on 
And turns no more his head ; 
Because he knows a frightful fiend 
Doth close behind him tread. i 

That the kind of fear here treated of is 
purely spiritual— that it is strong in propor- 
tion as it is objectless upon earth— that it 
predominates in the period of sinless in- 
fancy—are difficulties, the solution of which 
might afford some probable insight into our 
ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least 
into the shadow-land of preexistence. 

My night fancies have long ceased to 
be afflictive. I confess an occasional night- 
mare; but I do not, as in early youth, 
keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with 
the extinguished taper, will come and look 
at me; but I know them for mockeries, even 

1 Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. 

152 



WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS 

while I cannot elude their presence, and I 
fight and grapple with them. For the credit 
of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to 
say how tame and prosaic my dreams are 
grown. They are never romantic, seldom 
even rural. They are of architecture and 
of buildings— cities abroad, which I have 
never seen and hardly have hoped to see. 
I have traversed, for the seeming length of 
a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, 
Lisbon— their churches, palaces, squares, 
market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with 
an inexpressible sense of delight— a map- 
like distinctness of trace, and a daylight 
vividness of vision, that was all but being 
awake.— I have formerly traveled among the 
Westmoreland fells— my highest Alps,— but 
they are objects too mighty for the grasp of 
my dreaming recognition; and I have again 
and again awoke with ineffectual struggles 
of the inner eye, to make out a shape, in 
any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought 
I was in that country, but the mountains 
were gone. The poverty of my dreams mor- 
tifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will 
can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure- 
houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian 
maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns. 

Where Alph, the sacred river, runs, 
153 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



to solace his night solitudes— when I cannot 
muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his 
tritons and his nereids gamboling before 
him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming 
sons born to Neptune— when my stretch of 
imaginative activity can hardly, in the night 
season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. 
To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying 
light— it was after reading the noble Dream 
of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon 
these marine spectra; and the poor plastic 
power, such as it is, within me set to work 
to humor my folly in a sort of dream that 
very night. Methought I was upon the 
ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding 
and mounted high, with the customary 
train sounding their conchs before me (I 
myself, you may be sure, the leading god), 
and jollily we went careering over the main, 
till just where Ino Leucothea should have 
greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white 
embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, 
fell from a sea roughness to a sea calm, and 
thence to a river motion, and that river (as 
happens in the familiarization of dreams) 
was no other than the gentle Thames, which 
landed me in the wafture of a placid wave 
or two, alone, safe and inglorious, some- 
where at the foot of Lambeth palace. 
The degree of the soul's creativeness in 
154 



WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS 

sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion 
of the quantum of poetical faculty resident 
in the same soul waking. An old gentle- 
man, a friend of mine and a humorist, used 
to carry this notion so far, that when he 
saw any stripling of his acquaintance am- 
bitious of becoming a poet, his first ques- 
tion would be,— "Young man, what sort of 
dreams have you? " I have so much faith 
in my old friend's theory, that when I feel 
that idle vein returning upon me, I presently 
subside into my proper element of prose, 
remembering those eluding nereids, and 
that inauspicious inland landing. 



155 



VALENTINE'S DAY 



HAIL to thy returning festival, old 
Bishop Valentine! Great is thy 
name in the rubric, thou venerable 
Archflamen of Hymen! Immortal Go-be- 
tween; who and what manner of person art 
thou? Art thou but a name, typifying the 
restless principle which impels poor hu- 
mans to seek perfection in union? or wert 
thou indeed a mortal prelate, with thy tippet 
and thy rochet, thy apron on, and decent 
lawn sleeves? Mysterious personage! 
Like unto thee, assuredly, there is no other 
mitered father in the calendar; not Jerome, 
nor Ambrose, nor Cyril; nor the consigner 
of undipt infants to eternal torments, Aus- 
tin, whom all mothers hate; nor he who 
hated all mothers, Origen; nor Bishop Bull, 
nor Archbishop Parker, nor Whitgif t. Thou 
comest attended with thousands and ten 
thousands of little Loves, and the air is 

Brush' d with the hiss of rustling wings. 

Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy 
precentors; and instead of the crozier, the 
mystical arrow is borne before thee. 
156 



VALENTINE'S DAY 



In other words, this is the day on which 
those charming Httle missives, ycleped 
Valentines, cross and intercross each other 
at every street and turning. The weary and 
all forspent twopenny postman sinks be- 
neath a load of delicate embarrassments, 
not his own. It is scarcely credible to what 
an extent this ephemeral courtship is car- 
ried on in this loving town, to the great 
enrichment of porters, and detriment of 
knockers and bell-wires. In these little 
visual interpretations, no emblem is so 
common as the heart,— that little three- 
cornered exponent of all our hopes and 
fears,— the bestuck and bleeding heart; it is 
tivisted and tortured into more allegories 
and affectations than an opera-hat. What 
authority we have in history or mythology 
for placing the headquarters and metropolis 
of god Cupid in this anatomical seat rather 
than in any other, is not very clear; but we 
have got it, and it will serve as well as any 
other. Else we might easily imagine, upon 
some other system which might have pre- 
vailed for anything which our pathology 
knows to the contrary, a lover addressing 
his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, 
"Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely 
at your disposal"; or putting a delicate 
question, " Amanda, have you a midriff to 
157 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



bestow?" But custom has settled these 
things, and awarded the seat of sentiment 
to the aforesaid triangle, while its less for- 
tunate neighbors wait at animal and ana- 
tomical distance. 

Not many sounds in life, and I include all 
urban and all rural sounds, exceed in in- 
terest a knock at the door. It " gives a very- 
echo to the throne where Hope is seated." 
But its issues seldom answer to this oracle 
within. It is so seldom that just the person 
we want to see comes. But of all the clamo- 
rous visitations the welcomest in expecta- 
tion is the sound that ushers in, or seems 
to usher in, a Valentine. As the raven 
himself was hoarse that announced the 
fatal entrance of Duncan, so the knock of 
the postman on this day is light, airy, con- 
fident, and befitting one that bringeth good 
tidings. It is less mechanical than on other 
days; you will say, "That is not the post, I 
am sure." Visions of Love, of Cupids, of 
Hymens! — delightful eternal common- 
places, which "having been will always 
be"; which no school-boy nor school-man 
can write away; having your irreversible 
throne in the fancy and affections— what 
are your transports, when the happy maiden, 
opening with careful finger, careful not to 
break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the 
158 



VALENTINE'S DAY 



sight of some well-designed allegory, some 
type, some youthful fancy, not without 
verses- 
Lovers all, 
A madrigal, 

or some such device, not over-ahundant in 
sense— young Love disclaims it,— and not 
quite silly— something between wind and 
water, a chorus where the sheep might al- 
most join the shepherd, as they did, or as I 
apprehend they did, in Arcadia. 

All Valentines are not foolish; and I shall 
not easily forget thine, my kind friend (if I 

may have leave to call you so) E. B . 

E. B. lived opposite a young maiden whom 
he had often seen, unseen, from his parlor 

window in C e Street. She was all joy- 

ousness and innocence, and just of an age 
to enjoy receiving a Valentine, and just of 
a temper to bear the disappointment of 
missing one with good humor. E. B. is an 
artist of no common powers; in the fancy 
parts of designing, perhaps inferior to none; 
his name is known at the bottom of many 
a well-executed vignette in the way of his 
profession, but no further; for E. B. is mod- 
est, and the world meets nobody half-way. 
E. B. meditated how he could repay this 
young maiden for many a favor which she 
159 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



had done him unknown; for when n kindly- 
face greets us, though but passing by, and 
never kni>ws us ngain, nor wo it, wo should 
feel it as an obligation: and E. B. did. This 
good artist set himself at work to please the 
damsel. It was just before Valentino's day 
throe years since. He wrought, unseen and 
unsuspected, a w^ondrous worl<. We need 
not say it was on the tlnest gilt paper with 
borders— full, not of common hearts and 
heartless allegory, but all the prettiest 
stories of love from Ovid, and older poets 
than Ovid (for E. B. is a scholar). There 
was Pyranuis and Thisbe, and be sure Dido 
was not forgot, nor Hero and Leander, and 
swans more than sang in Cayster, with mot- 
tos and fanciful devices, such as beseemed 
—a work, in short, of magic, h-is dipt the 
woof. This on Valentine's eve he com- 
mended to the all-swallowing indiscriminate 
orifice— (O ignoble trust!)— of the common 
post: but the humble medium did its duty, 
and from his watchful stand the next morn- 
ing he saw the cheerful messenger knock, 
and by and by the precious charge delivered. 
He saw, unseen, the happy girl unfold the 
Valentine, dance about, clap her hands, as 
one after one the pretty emblems unfolded 
themselves. She danced about, not with 
light love, or foolish expectations, for she 
IGO 



VALENTINE'S DAY 



had no lover; or, if she had, none she knew 
that could have created t?iose bright images 
which delighted her. It was more like 
some fairy present; a Godsend, as our fa- 
miliarly inouH ancestors termed a benefit 
received where the benefactor was unknown. 
It would do her no harm. It would do her 
good forever after. It is good to love the 
unknown. I only give this as a specimen 
of E. B. and his modest way of doing a con- 
cealed kindness. 

Good morrow to my Valentine, sings poor 
Ophelia; and no better wish, but with better 
auspices, we wish to all faithful lovers, who 
are not too wise to despise old legends, but 
are content to rank themselves humble 
diocesans of old Bishop Valentine and his 
true church. 



161 



MY RELATIONS 



I AM arrived at that point of life at which 
a man may account it a blessing, as it is 
a singularity, if he have either of his 
parents surviving. I have not that felicity 
—and sometimes think feelingly of a pas- 
sage in Browne's Christian Morals, where he 
speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or 
seventy years in the world. "In such a 
compass of time," he says, "a man may 
have a close apprehension what it is to be 
forgotten, when he hath lived to find none 
who could remember his father, or scarcely 
the friends of his youth, and may sensibly 
see with what a face in no long time OB- 
LIVION will look upon himself." 

I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She 
was one whom single blessedness had soured 
to the world. She often used to say, that I 
was the only thing in it which she loved; 
and, when she thought I was quitting it, she 
grieved over me with mother's tears. A 
partiality quite so exclusive my reason 
cannot altogether approve. She was from 
morning till night poring over good books 
162 



MY RELATIONS 



and devotional exercises. Her favorite 
volumes were, Thomas a Kempis, in Stan- 
hope's translation; and a Roman Catholic 
Prayer-book, with the matins and complins 
regularly set down— terms which I was at 
that time too young to understand. She 
persisted in reading them, although ad- 
monished daily concerning their Papistical 
tendency; and went to church every Sab- 
bath, as a good Protestant should do. These 
were the only books she studied; though, I 
think at one period of her life, she told me, 
she had read with great satisfaction the 
Adventures of an Unfortunate Young 
Nobleman. Finding the door of the chapel 
in Essex Street open one day— it was in the 
infancy of that heresy— she went in, liked 
the sermon, and the manner of worship, and 
frequented it at intervals for some time 
after. She came not for doctrinal points, 
and never missed them. With some little 
asperities in her constitution, which I have 
above hinted at, she was a steadfast, friendly 
being, and a fine old Christian. She was a 
woman of strong sense, and a shrewd mind 
—extraordinary at a repartee; one of the 
few occasions of her breaking silence— else 
she did not much value wit. The only 
secular employment I remember to have 
seen her engaged in, was the splitting of 
163 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



French beans, and dropping them into a 
china basin of fair water. The odor of those 
tender vegetables to this day comes back 
upon my sense, redolent of soothing recol- 
lections. Certainly it is the most delicate 
of culinary operations. 

Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I 
had none— to remember. By the uncle's 
side I may be said to have been born an 
orphan. Brother, or sister, I never had any 
—to know them. A sister, I think, that 
should have been Elizabeth, died in both 
our infancies. What a comfort, or what a 
care, may I not have missed in her!— But I 
have cousins sprinkled about in Hertford- 
shire—besides two, with whom I have been 
all my life in habits of the closest intimacy, 
and whom I may term cousins par excel- 
lence. These are James and Bridget Elia. 
They are older than myself by twelve, and 
ten, years; and neither of them seems dis- 
posed, in matters of advice and guidance, 
to waive any of the prerogatives which 
primogeniture confers. May they continue 
still in the same mind; and when they shall 
be seventy-five, and seventy-three, years 
old (I cannot spare them sooner), persist in 
treating me in my grand climacteric pre- 
cisely as a stripling, or younger brother! 

James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature 
164 



MY RELATIONS 



hath her unities, which not every critic can 
penetrate; or, if we feel, we cannot explain 
them. The pen of Yorick, and of none since 
his, could have drawn J. E. entire— those 
fine Shandean lights and shades, which 
make up his story. I must limp after in 
my poor antithetical manner, as the fates 
have given me grace and talent. J. E. then 
—to the eye of a common observer at least 
— seemeth made up of contradictory prin- 
ciples. The genuine child of impulse, the 
frigid philosopher of prudence— the phlegm 
of my cousin's doctrine, is invariably at 
war with his temperament, which is high 
sanguine. With always some fire-new 
project in his brain, J. E. is the systematic 
opponent of innovation, and crier down of 
everything that has not stood the test of 
age and experiment. With a hundred fine 
notions chasing one another hourly in his 
fancy, he is startled at the least approach 
to the romantic in others; and, determined 
by his own sense in everything, commends 
you to the guidance of common sense on 
all occasions.— With a touch of the eccen- 
tric in all which he does or says, he is only 
anxious that you should not commit your- 
self by doing anything absurd or singular. 
On my once letting slip at table, that I was 
not fond of a certain popular dish, he begged 
165 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



me at any rate not to say so— for the world 
would think me mad. He disguises a pas- 
sionate fondness for works of high art 
(whereof he hath amassed a choice collec- 
tion), under the pretext of buying only to 
sell again— that his enthusiasm may give 
no encouragement to yours. Yet, if it were 
so, why does that piece of tender, pastoral 
Domenichino hang still by his wall?— is the 
ball of his sight much more dear to him?— 
or what picture-dealer can talk like him? 

Whereas mankind in general are observed 
to warp their speculative conclusions to the 
bent of their individual humors, Ms theories 
are sure to be in diametrical opposition 
to his constitution. He is courageous as 
Charles of Sweden, upon instinct; chary of 
his person upon principle, as a traveling 
Quaker. — He has been preaching up to me, 
all my life, the doctrine of bowing to the 
great— the necessity of forms, and man- 
ners, to a man's getting on in the world. 
He himself never aims at either, that I can 
discover,— and has a spirit that would stand 
upright in the presence of the Cham of 
Tartary. It is pleasant to hear him dis- 
course of patience— extolling it as the truest 
wisdom— and to see him during the last 
seven minutes that his dinner is getting 
ready. Nature never ran up in her haste 
166 



MY RELATIONS 



a more restless piece of workmanship than 
when she molded this impetuous cousin— 
and Art never turned out a more elaborate 
orator than he can display himself to be, 
upon his favorite topic of the advantages of 
quiet and contentedness in the state, what- 
ever it be, that we are placed in. He is tri- 
umphant on this theme, when he has you 
safe in one of those short stages that ply 
for the western road, in a very obstructing 
manner, at the foot of John Murray's Street 
—where you get in when it is empty, and 
are expected to wait till the vehicle hath 
completed her just freight— a trying three 
quarters of an hour to some people. He 
wonders at your fidgetiness,— "where could 
we be better than we are, thus sitting, thus 
consulting ?"—" prefers, for his part, a state 
of rest to locomotion,"— with an eye all the 
while upon the coachman,— till at length, 
waxing out of all patience, at your want of 
it, he breaks out into a pathetic remon- 
strance at the fellow for detaining us so 
long over the time which he had professed, 
and declares peremptorily, that "the gen- 
tleman in the coach is determined to get 
out, if he does not drive on that instant." 
Very quick at inventing an argument, or 
detecting a sophistry, he is incapable of 
attending you in any chain of arguing. In- 
167 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



deed, he makes wild work with logic; and 
seems to jump at most admirable conclu- 
sions by some process not at all akin to it. 
Consonantly enough to this, he hath been 
heard to deny, upon certain occasions, that 
there exists such a faculty at all in man as 
7'eason ; and wondereth how man came first 
to have a conceit of it— enforcing his nega- 
tion with all the might of reasoning he is 
master of. He has some speculative notions 
against laughter, and will maintain that 
laughing is not natural to Mtyi — when per- 
adventure the next moment his lungs shall 
crow like chanticleer. He says some of the 
best things in the world— and declareth 
that wit is his aversion. It was he who 
said, upon seeing the Eton boys at play in 
their grounds— W/iai a pity to think that 
these fine ingenuous lads in a few years will 
all he changed into frivolous Members of 
Parliament ! 

His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestu- 
ous—and in age he disco vereth no symptom 
of cooling. This is that which I admire in 
him. I hate people who meet Time half- 
way. I am for no compromise with that 
inevitable spoiler. While he lives, J. E. will 
take his swing.— It does me good, as I walk 
towards the street of my daily avocation, on 
some fine May morning, to meet him march- 
168 



MY RELATIONS 



ing in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly- 
handsome presence, and shining sanguine 
face, that indicates some purchase in his 
eye— a Claude— or a Hohhema— for much of 
his enviable leisure is consumed at Chris- 
tie's and Phillips's— or where not, to pick 
up pictures, and such gauds. On these 
occasions he mostly stoppeth me, to read a 
short lecture on the advantage a person like 
me possesses above himself, in having his 
time occupied with business which he must 
do— assureth me that he often feels it hang 
heavy on his hands— wishes he had fewer 
holidays— and goes off— Westward Ho!— 
chanting a tune, to Pall Mall— perfectly con- 
vinced that he has convinced me— while I 
proceed in my opposite direction tuneless. 
It is pleasant, again, to see this Professor 
of Indifference doing the honors of his new 
purchase, when he has fairly housed it. 
You must view it in every light, till he has 
found the best— placing it at this distance, 
and at that, but always suiting the focus of 
your sight to his own. You must spy at it 
through your fingers, to catch the aerial 
perspective— though you assure him that 
to you the landscape shows much more 
agreeable without that artifice. Woe be to 
the luckless wight who does not only not 
respond to his rapture, but who should drop 
169 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



an unseasonable intimation of preferring 
one of his anterior bargains to the present! 
—The last is always his best hit— his "Cyn- 
thia of the minute."— Alas! how many a 
mild Madonna have I known to come in— a 
Raphael!— keep its ascendancy for a few 
brief moons— then, after certain intermedial 
degradations, from the front drawing-room 
to the back gallery, thence to the dark par- 
lor,— adopted in turn by each of the Car- 
racci, under successive lowering ascriptions 
of filiation, mildly breaking its fall— con- 
signed to the oblivious lumber-room, go out 
at last a Lucca Giordano, or plain Carlo 
Maratti!— which things when I beheld— 
musing upon the chances and mutabilities 
of fate below hath made me to reflect upon 
the altered condition of great personages, 
or that woeful Queen of Richard the Sec- 
ond— 

— set forth in pomp, 

She came adornfed hither like sweet May ; 

Sent back like Hallowmas or shortest day. 

With great love for you, J. E. hath but a 
limited sympathy with what you feel or do. 
He lives in a world of his own, and makes 
slender guesses at what passes in your 
mind. He never pierces the marrow of your 
habits. He will tell an old-established play- 
170 



MY RELATIONS 



goer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so 
(naming one of the theaters), is a very Hvely 
comedian— as a piece of news! He adver- 
tised me but the other day of some pleasant 
green lanes which he had found out for me, 
knowing me to be a great walker, in my own 
immediate vicinity— who have haunted the 
identical spot any time these twenty years! 
—He has not much respect for that class of 
feelings which goes by the name of senti- 
mental. He applies the definition of real 
evil to bodily sufferings exclusively— and 
rejecteth all others as imaginary. He is 
affected by the sight, or the bare supposi- 
tion, of a creature in pain, to a degree which 
I have never witnessed out of womankind. 
A constitutional acuteness to this class of 
sufferings may in part account for this. 
The animal tribe in particular he taketh 
under his especial protection. A broken- 
winded or spur-galled horse is sure to find 
an advocate in him. An overloaded ass is 
his client forever. He is the apostle to the 
brute kind— the never-failing friend of those 
who have none to care for them. The con- 
templation of a lobster boiled, or eels 
skinned alive, will wring him so, that "all 
for pity he could die." It will take the 
savor from his palate, and the rest from 
his pillow, for days and nights. With the 
171 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



intense feeling of Thomas Clarkson, he 
wanted only the steadiness of pursuit, and 
unity of purpose, of that "true yokefellow 
with Time," to have effected as much for 
the Animal as he hath done for the Negro 
Creation. But my uncontrollable cousin is 
but imperfectly formed for purposes which 
demand cooperation. He cannot wait. His 
amelioration-plans must be ripened in a day. 
For this reason he has cut but an equivocal 
figure in benevolent societies, and combina- 
tions for the alleviation of human suffer- 
ings. His zeal constantly makes him to 
outrun, and put out, his coadjutors. He 
thinks of relieving,— while they think of 
debating. He was blackballed out of a so- 
ciety for the Relief of * * * * * because 
the fervor of his humanity toiled beyond 
the formal apprehension and creeping pro- 
cesses of his associates. I shall always con- 
sider this distinction as a patent of nobility 
in the Elia family! 

Do I mention these seeming inconsisten- 
cies to smile at, or upbraid, my unique 
cousin? Marry, heaven, and all good man- 
ners, and the understanding that should be 
between kinsfolk, forbid!— With all the 
strangenesses of this strangest of the Elias 
— I would not have him in one jot or tittle 
other than he is; neither would I barter or 
172 



MY RELATIONS 



exchange my wild kinsman for the most 
exact, regular, and every way consistent 
kinsman breathing. 

In my next, reader, I may perhaps give 
you some account of my cousin Bridget— 
if you are not already surfeited with cousins 
—and take you by the hand, if you are will- 
ing to go with us, on an excursion which we 
made a summer or two since, in search of 
more cousins— 

Through the green plains of pleasant Hertford- 
shire. 



173 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE 



BRIDGET ELIA has been my house- 
keeper for many a long year. I have 
obligations to Bridget, extending^be- 
yond the period of memory. We house 
together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of 
double singleness; with such tolerable com- 
fort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in 
myself no sort of disposition to go out upon 
the mountains, with the rash king's off- 
spring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree 
pretty well in our tastes and habits— yet so, 
as "with a difference." We are generally 
in harmony, with occasional bickerings— as 
it should be among near relations. Our 
sympathies are rather understood than ex- 
pressed; and once, upon my dissembling a 
tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, 
my cousin burst into tears, and complained 
that I was altered. We are both great 
readers in different directions. While I am 
hanging over (for the thousandth time) 
some passage in old Burton, or one of his 
strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in 
some modern tale or adventure, whereof 
174 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE 

our common reading-table is daily fed 
with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative 
teases me. I have little concern in the 
progress of events. She must have a story 
—well, ill, or indifferently told— so there be 
life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil 
accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in 
fiction — and almost in real life— have ceased 
to interest, or operate but dully upon me. 
Out-of-the-way humors and opinions— 
heads with some diverting twist in them— 
the oddities of authorship, please me most. 
My cousin has a native disrelish of anything 
that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes 
down with her that is quaint, irregular, or 
out of the road of common sympathy. She 
" holds Nature more clever." I can pardon 
her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of 
the Religio Medici; but she must apologize 
to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, 
which she has been pleased to throw out 
latterly, touching the intellectuals of a dear 
favorite of mine, of the last century but one 
—the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, but 
again somewhat fantastical and original- 
brained, generous Margaret Newcastle. 

It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener 
perhaps than I could have wished, to have 
had for her associates and mine, free-think- 
ers—leaders, and disciples, of novel philoso- 
175 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



phies and systems; but she neither wrangles 
with, nor accepts, their opinions. That 
which was good and venerable to her, when 
a child, retains its authority over her mind 
still. She never juggles or plays tricks 
with her understanding. 

We are both of us inclined to be a little 
too positive; and I have observed the result 
of our disputes to be almost uniformly this 
—that in matters of fact, dates, and cir- 
cumstances, it turns out that I was in the 
right, and my cousin in the wrong. But 
where we have differed upon moral points; 
upon something proper to be done, or let 
alone; whatever heat of opposition or steadi- 
ness of conviction I set out with, I am sure 
always, in the long run, to be brought over 
to her way of thinking. 

I must touch upon the foibles of my kins- 
woman with a gentle hand, for Bridget does 
not like to be told of her faults. She hath 
an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of 
reading in company: at which times she 
will answer yes or no to a question, without 
fully understanding its purport— which is 
provoking, and derogatory in the highest 
degree to the dignity of the putter of the 
said question. Her presence of mind is 
equal to the most pressing trials of life, but 
will sometimes desert her upon trifling 
176 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE 



occasions. When the purpose requires it, 
and is a thing of moment, she can speak 
to it greatly; but in matters which are 
not stuff of the conscience, she hath been 
known sometimes to let slip a word less 
seasonably. 

Her education in youth was not much 
attended to; and she happily missed all that 
train of female garniture which passeth by 
the name of accomplishments. She was 
tumbled early, by accident or design, into a 
spacious closet of good old English reading, 
without much selection or prohibition, and 
browsed at will upon that fair and whole- 
some pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they 
should be brought up exactly in this fashion. 
I know not whether their chance in wedlock 
might not be diminished by it, but I can 
answer for it that it makes (if the worst 
come to the worst) most incomparable old 
maids. 

In a season of distress, she is the truest 
comforter; but in the teasing accidents and 
minor perplexities, which do not call out 
the will to meet them, she sometimes 
maketh matters worse by an excess of par- 
ticipation. If she does not always divide 
your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions 
of life she is sure always to treble your 
satisfaction. She is excellent to be at a 

12 irjrj 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



play with, or upon a visit; but best, when 
she goes a journey with you. 

We made an excursion together a few 
summers since into Hertfordshire, to beat 
up the quarters of some of our less-known 
relations in that fine corn country. 

The oldest thing I remember is Mackery 
End, or Mackarel End, as it is spelt, perhaps 
more properly, in some old maps of Hert- 
fordshire; a farm-house,— delightfully situ- 
ated within a gentle walk from Wheathamp- 
stead. I can just remember having been 
there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was 
a child, under the care of Bridget; who, as I 
have said, is older than myself by some ten 
years. I wish that I could throw into a 
heap the remainder of our joint existences, 
that we might share them in equal division. 
But that is impossible. The house was at 
that time in the occupation of a substantial 
yeoman, who had married my grand- 
mother's sister. His name was Gladman. 
My grandmother was a Bruton, married to 
a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons 
are still flourishing in that part of the 
county, but the Fields are almost extinct. 
More than forty years had elapsed since the 
visit I speak of; and, for the greater portion 
of that period, we had lost sight of the 
other two branches also. Who or what 
178 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE 

sort of persons inherited Mackery End— 
kindred or strange folk— we were afraid 
almost to conjecture, but determined some 
day to explore. 

By somewhat a circuitous route, taking 
the noble park at Luton in our way from 
St. Albans, we arrived at the spot of our 
anxious curiosity about noon. The sight of 
the old farm-house, though every trace of 
it was effaced from my recollections, affected 
me with a pleasure which I had not experi- 
enced for many a year. For though / had 
forgotten it, we had never forgotten being 
there together, and we had been talking 
about Mackery End all our lives, till memory 
on my part became mocked with a phantom 
of itself, and I thought I knew the aspect 
of a place which, when present, how un- 
like it was to that which I had conjured up 
so many times instead of it! 

Still the air breathed balmily about it; the 
season was in the "heart of June," and I 
could say with the poet. 

But thou, that didst appear so fair 

To fond imagination, 
Dost rival in the light of day 

Her delicate creation ! 

Bridget's was more a waking bliss than 
mine, for she easily remembered her old 
179 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



acquaintance again— some altered features, 
of course, a little grudged at. At first, in- 
deed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy; 
but the scene soon reconfirmed itself in her 
aflfections— and she traversed every outpost 
of the old mansion, to the woodhouse, the 
orchard, the place where the pigeon-house 
had stood (house and birds were alike flown) 
—with a breathless impatience of recogni- 
tion, which was more pardonable perhaps 
than decorous at the age of fifty odd. But 
Bridget in some things is behind her years. 
The only thing left was to get into the 
house— and that was a difficulty which to 
me singly would have been insurmountable; 
for I am terribly shy in making myself 
known to strangers and out-of-date kins- 
folk. Love, stronger than scruple, winged 
my cousin in without me; but she soon re- 
turned with a creature that might have sat 
to a sculptor for the image of Welcome. It 
was the youngest of the Gladmans; who, 
by marriage with a Bruton, had become 
mistress of the old mansion. A comely 
brood are the Brutons. Six of them, fe- 
males, were noted as the handsomest young 
women in the county. But this adopted 
Bruton, in my mind, was better than they 
all— more comely. She was born too late 
to have remembered me. She just recol- 
180 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE 

lected in early life to have had her cousin 
Bridget once pointed out to her, climbing a 
stile. But the name of kindred and of cousin- 
ship was enough. Those slender ties, that 
prove slight as gossamer in the rending 
atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as 
we found it, in hearty, homely, loving Hert- 
fordshire. In five minutes we were as thor- 
oughly acquainted as if we had been born 
and bred up together; were familiar, even 
to the calling each other by our Christian 
names. So Christians should call one an- 
other. To have seen Bridget and her— it 
was like the meeting of the two scriptural 
cousins! There was a grace and dignity, 
an amplitude of form and stature, answer- 
ing to her mind, in this farmer's wife, which 
would have shined in a palace— or so we 
thought it. We were made welcome by 
husband and wife equally— we, and our 
friend that was with us.— I had almost for- 
gotten him— but B. F. will not so soon 
forget that meeting, if peradventure he 
shall read this on the far-distant shores 
where the kangaroo haunts. The fatted 
calf was made ready, or rather was already 
so, as if in anticipation of our coming; and 
after an appropriate glass of native wine, 
never let me forget with what honest pride 
this hospitable cousin made us proceed to 
181 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



Wheathampstead, to introduce us (as some 
new-found rarity) to her mother and sister 
Gladmans, who did indeed know something 
more of us, at a time when she almost knew 
nothing.— With what corresponding kind- 
ness we were received by them also— how 
Bridget's memory, exalted by the occasion, 
warmed into a thousand half-obliterated 
recollections of things and persons, to my 
utter astonishment, and her own— and to 
the astoundment of B. F., who sat by, almost 
the only thing that was not a cousin there, 
—old effaced images of more than half- 
forgotten names and circumstances still 
crowding back upon her, as words written 
in lemon come out upon exposure to a 
friendly warmth,— when I forget all this, 
then may my country cousins forget me; 
and Bridget no more remember that in the 
days of weakling infancy I was her tender 
charge— as I have been her care in foolish 
manhood since— in those pretty pastoral 
walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in 
Hertfordshire. 



182 



MY FIRST PLAY 



AT the north end of Cross Court there 
/\ yet stands a portal, of some archi- 
J^\. tectural pretensions, though reduced 
to humble use, serving at present for an 
entrance to a printing-office. This old door- 
way, if you are young, reader, you may not 
know was the identical pit entrance to old 
Drury— Garrick's Drury— all of it that is 
left. I never pass it without shaking some 
forty years from off my shoulders, recurring 
to the evening when I passed through it to 
see my first play. The afternoon had been 
wet, and the condition of our going (the 
elder folks and myself) was, that the rain 
should cease. With what a beating heart 
did I watch from the window the puddles, 
from the stillness of which I was taught to 
prognosticate the desired cessation ! I seem 
to remember the last spurt, and the glee 
with which I ran to announce it. 

We went with orders, which my godfather 

P. had sent us. He kept the oil-shop (now 

Davies's) at the corner of Featherstone- 

buildings, in Holborn. F. was a tall grave 

183 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



person, lofty in speech, and had pretensions 
above his rank. He associated in those days 
with John Palmer, the comedian, whose 
gait and bearing he seemed to copy; if John 
(which is quite as likely) did not rather 
borrow somewhat of his manner from my 
godfather. He was also known to and 
visited by Sheridan. It was to his house in 
Holborn that young Brinsley brought his 
first wife on her elopement with him from 
a boarding-school at Bath— the beautiful 
Maria Linley. My parents were present 
(over a quadrille-table) when he arrived in 
the evening with his harmonious charge. 
From either of these connections it may be 
inferred that my godfather could command 
an order for the then Drury Lane theater at 
pleasure — and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue 
of those cheap billets, in Brinsley's easy 
autograph, I have heard him say was the 
sole remuneration which he had received 
for many years' nightly illumination of the 
orchestra and various avenues of that 
theater— and he was content it should be 
so. The honor of Sheridan's familiarity — 
or supposed familiarity— was better to my 
godfather than money. 

F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen; 
grandiloquent, yet courteous. His delivery 
of the commonest matters of fact was Cice- 
184 



MY FIRST PLAY 



ronian. He had two Latin words almost 
constantly in his mouth (how odd sounds 
Latin from an oilman's lips!), which my 
better knowledge since has enabled me to 
correct. In strict pronunciation they should 
have been sounded vice versa— but in those 
young years they impressed me with more 
awe than they would now do, read aright 
from Seneca or Varro— in his own peculiar 
pronunciation, monosyllabically elaborated, 
or Anglicized, into something like verse 
verse. By an imposing manner, and the 
help of these distorted syllables, he climbed 
(but that was little) to the highest parochial 
honors which St. Andrew's has to bestow. 
He is dead— and thus much I thought due 
to his memory, both for my first orders 
(little wondrous talismans!— slight keys, 
and insignificant to outward sight, but open- 
ing to me more than Arabian paradises I 
and, moreover, that by his testamentary 
beneficence I came into possession of the 
only landed property which I could ever call 
my own — situate near the roadway village 
of pleasant Puckeridge, in Hertfordshire. 
When I journeyed down to take possession, 
and planted foot on my own ground, the 
stately habits of the donor descended upon 
me, and I strode (shall I confess the vanity?) 
with larger paces over my allotment of 
185 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



three quarters of an acre, with its commo- 
dious mansion in the midst, with the feehng 
of an English freeholder that all betwixt 
sky and center was my own. The estate 
has passed into more prudent hands, and 
nothing but an agrarian can restore it. 

In those days were pit orders. Beshrew 
the uncomfortable manager who abolished 
them!— with one of these we went. I re- 
member the waiting at the door— not that 
which is left— but between that and an 
inner door in shelter— when shall I be 
such an expectant again!— with the cry of 
nonpareils, an indispensable playhouse ac- 
companiment in those days. As near as I 
can recollect, the fashionable pronunciation 
of the theatrical fruiteresses then was, 
"Chase some oranges, chase some numpa- 
rels, chase a bill of the play";— chase pro 
choose. But when we got in, and I beheld 
the green curtain that veiled a heaven to 
my imagination, which was soon to be dis- 
closed—the breathless anticipations I en- 
dured! I had seen something like it in the 
plate prefixed to Troilus and Cressida, in 
Rowe's Shakspere— the tent scene with 
Diomede— and a sight of that plate can al- 
ways bring back in a measure the feeling of 
that evening.— The boxes at that time, full 
of well-dressed women of quality, projected 
186 



MY FIRST PLAY 



over the pit; and the pilasters reaching 
down were adorned with a glistering sub- 
stance (I know not what) under glass (as it 
seemed), resembling— a homely fancy— but 
I judged it to be sugar-candy— yet to my 
raised imagination, divested of its homelier 
qualities, it appeared a glorified candy!— 
The orchestra lights at length arose, those 
"fair Auroras!" Once the bell sounded. 
It was to ring out yet once again— and, 
incapable of the anticipation, I reposed 
my shut eyes in a sort of resignation upon 
the maternal lap. It rang the second 
time. The curtain drew up— I was not 
past six years old, — and the play was Ar- 
taxerxes! 

I had dabbled a little in the Universal 
History— the ancient part of it— and here 
was the court of Persia.— It was being ad- 
mitted to a sight of the past. I took no 
proper interest in the action going on, for 
I understood not its import— but I heard 
the word Darius, and I was in the midst of 
Daniel. All feeling was absorbed in vision. 
Gorgeous vests, gardens, palaces, prin- 
cesses, passed before me. I knew not 
players. I was in Persepolis for the time, 
and the burning idol of their devotion 
almost converted me into a worshiper. I 
was awe-struck, and believed those signifi- 
187 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



cations to be something more than ele- 
mental fires. It was all enchantment and 
a dream. No such pleasure has since 
visited me but in dreams.— Harlequin's 
invasion followed; where, I remember, the 
transformation of the magistrates into 
reverend beldams seemed to me a piece of 
grave historic justice, and the tailor carry- 
ing hisjown head to be as sober a verity as 
the legend of St. Denys. 

The next play to which I was taken was 
the Lady of the Manor, of which, with the 
exception of some scenery, very faint traces 
are left in my memory. It was followed by 
a pantomime, called Lun's Ghost — a satiric 
touch, I apprehend, upon Rich, not long 
since dead— but to my apprehension (too 
sincere for satire), Lun was as remote a 
piece of antiquity as Lud— the father of a 
line of Harlequins— transmitting his dagger 
of lath (the wooden scepter) through count- 
less ages. I saw the primeval Motley come 
from his silent tomb in a ghastly vest of 
white patchwork, like the apparition of a 
dead rainbow. So Harlequins (thought I) 
look when they are dead. 

My third play followed in quick succes- 
sion. It was the Way of the World. I 
think I must have sat at it as grave as a 
judge; for I remember the hysteric affecta- 
188 



MY FIRST PLAY 



tions of good Lady Wishfort affected me 
like some solemn tragic passion. Robinson 
Crusoe followed; in which Crusoe, man 
Friday, and the parrot, were as good and 
authentic as in the story.— The clownery 
and pantaloonery of these pantomimes have 
clean passed out of my head. I believe, 
I no more laughed at them, than at the 
same age I should have been disposed to 
laugh at the grotesque Gothic heads (seem- 
ing to me then replete with devout mean- 
ing) that gape and grin, in stone around the 
inside of the old Round Church (my church) 
of the Templars. 

I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, 
when I was from six to seven years old. 
After the intervention of six or seven other 
years (for at school all playgoing was in- 
hibited) I again entered the doors of a 
theater. That old Artaxerxes evening had 
never done ringing in my fancy. I expected 
the same feelings to come again with the 
same occasion. But we differ from our- 
selves less at sixty and sixteen, than the 
latter does from six. In that interval what 
had I not lost! At the first period I knew 
nothing, understood nothing, discriminated 
nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered all— 

Was nourished, I could not tell how— 
189 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



I had left the temple a devotee, and was 
returned a rationalist. The same things 
were there materially; but the emblem, the 
reference, was gone!— The green curtain 
was no longer a veil, drawn between two 
worlds, the unfolding of which was to bring 
back past ages, to present a " royal ghost," 
—but a certain quantity of green baize, 
which was to separate the audience for a 
given time from certain of their fellow-men 
who were to come forward and pretend 
those parts. The lights— the orchestra 
lights— came up a clumsy machinery. The 
first ring, and the second ring, was now but 
a trick of the prompter's bell— which had 
been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phantom 
of a voice, no hand seen or guessed at which 
ministered to its warning. The actors were 
men and women painted. I thought the 
fault was in them; but it was in myself, and 
the alteration which those many centuries 
—of six short twelvemonths— had wrought 
in me.— Perhaps it was fortunate for me 
that the play of the evening was but an 
indifferent comedy, as it gave me time to 
crop some unreasonable expectations, which 
might have interfered with the genuine 
emotions with which I was soon after en- 
abled to enter upon the first appearance to 
me of Mrs. Siddons in Isabella. Comparison 
190 



MY FIRST PLAY 



and retrospection soon yielded to the pres- 
ent attraction of the scene; and the theater 
became to me, upon a new stock, the most 
delightful of recreations. 



191 



MODERN GALLANTRY 



IN comparing modern with ancient man- 
ners, we are pleased to compliment our- 
selves upon the point of gallantry; a 
certain obsequiousness, or deferential re- 
spect, which we are supposed to pay to 
females, as females. 

I shall believe that this principle actuates 
our conduct, when I can forget, that in the 
nineteenth century of the era from which 
we date our civility, we are but just begin- 
ning to leave off the very frequent practice 
of whipping females in public, in common 
with the coarsest male offenders. 

I shall believe it to be influential, when I 
can shut my eyes to the fact that in Eng- 
land women are still occasionally— hanged. 

I shall believe in it, when actresses are 
no longer subject to be hissed off a stage 
by gentlemen. 

I shall believe in it, when Dorimant 
hands a fishwife across the kennel; or as- 
sists the apple-woman to pick up her wan- 
dering fruit, which some unlucky dray has 
just dissipated. 

192 



MODERN GALLANTRY 



I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants 
in humbler life, who would be thought in 
their way notable adepts in this refinement, 
shall act upon it in places where they are 
not known, or think themselves not ob- 
served—when I shall see the traveler for 
some rich tradesman part with his admired 
box-coat, to spread it over the defenseless 
shoulders of the poor woman, who is pass- 
ing to her parish on the roof of the same 
stage-coach with him, drenched in the rain 
—when I shall no longer see a woman stand- 
ing up in the pit of a London theater, till 
she is sick and faint with the exertion, with 
men about her, seated at their ease, and 
jeering at her distress; till one, that seems 
to have more manners or conscience than 
the rest, significantly declares "she should 
be welcome to his seat, if she were a little 
younger and handsomer." Place this dap- 
per warehouseman, or that rider, in a circle 
of their own female acquaintance, and you 
shall confess you have not seen a politer- 
bred man in Lothbury. 

Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there 
is some such principle influencing our con- 
duct, when more than one half of the drudg- 
ery and coarse servitude of the world shall 
cease to be performed by women. 

Until that day comes I shall never believe 
13 193 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



this boasted point to be anything more than 
a conventional fiction; a pageant got up 
between the sexes, in a certain rank, and 
at a certain time of life, in which both find 
their account equally. 

I shall be even disposed to rank it among 
the salutary fictions of life, when in polite 
circles I shall see the same attentions paid 
to age as to youth, to homely features as to 
handsome, to coarse complexions as to 
clear— to the woman, as she is a woman, 
not as she is a beauty, a fortune, or a title. 

I shall believe it to be something more 
than a name, when a well-dressed gentle- 
man in a well-dressed company can advert 
to the topic of female old age without ex- 
citing, and intending to excite, a sneer:— 
when the phrases "antiquated virginity," 
and such a one has " overstood her market," 
pronounced in good company, shall raise 
immediate offense in man, or woman, that 
shall hear them spoken. 

Joseph Paice, of Bread Street Hill, mer- 
chant, and one of the Directors of the South 
Sea Company— the same to whom Edwards, 
the Shakspere commentator, has addressed 
a fine sonnet— was the only pattern of con- 
sistent gallantry I have met with. He took 
me under his shelter at an early age, and 
bestowed some pains upon me. I owe to 
194 



MODERN GALLANTRY 



his precepts and example whatever there is 
of the man of business (and that is not 
much) in my composition. It was not his 
fault that I did not profit more. Though 
bred a Presbyterian, and brought up a mer- 
chant, he was the finest gentleman of his 
time. He had not one system of attention 
to females in the drawing-room, and another 
in the shop, or at the stall. I do not mean 
that he made no distinction. But he never 
lost sight of sex, or overlooked it in the 
casualties of a disadvantageous situation. 
I have seen him stand bareheaded— smile 
if you please— to a poor servant-girl, while 
she has been inquiring of him the way to 
some street— in such a posture of unforced 
civility, as neither to embarrass her in the 
acceptance, nor himself in the offer, of it. 
He was no dangler, in the common accepta- 
tion of the word, after women; but he rever- 
enced and upheld, in every form in which 
it came before him, womanhood. I have 
seen him — nay, smile not— tenderly escort- 
ing a market-woman, whom he had encoun- 
tered in a shower, exalting his umbrella 
over her poor basket of fruit, that it might 
receive no damage, with as much careful- 
ness as if she had been a countess. To the 
reverend form of Female Eld he would yield 
the wall (though it were to an ancient beg- 
195 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



gar-woman) with more ceremony than we 
can afford to show our grandams. He was 
the Preux Chevaher of Age; the Sir Calidore, 
or Sir Tristan, to those who have no Cah- 
dores or Tristans to defend them. The 
roses, that had long faded thence, still 
bloomed for him in those withered and 
yellow cheeks. 

He was never married, but in his youth 
he paid his addresses to the beautiful Susan 
Winstanley— old Winstanley's daughter of 
Clapton— who dying in the early days of 
their courtship, confirmed in him the reso- 
lution of perpetual bachelorship. It was 
during their short courtship, he told me, 
that he had been one day treating his mis- 
tress with a prof usion of civil speeches— the 
common gallantries— to which kind of thing 
she had hitherto manifested no repugnance 
—but in this instance with no effect. He 
could not obtain from her a decent acknow- 
ledgment in return. She rather seemed to 
resent his compliments. He could not set 
it down to caprice, for the lady had always 
shown herself above that littleness. When 
he ventured on the following day, finding 
her a little better humored, to expostulate 
with her on her coldness of yesterday, she 
confessed, with her usual frankness, that 
she had no sort of dislike to his attentions; 
196 



MODERN GALLANTRY 



that she could even endure some high- 
flown compHments; that a young woman 
placed in her situation had a right to expect 
all sorts of civil things said to her; that she 
hoped she could digest a dose of adulation, 
short of insincerity, with as little injury to 
her humility as most young women; hut 
that— a little before he had commenced his 
compliments— she had overheard him by 
accident, in rather rough language, rating 
a young woman, who had not brought home 
his cravats quite to the appointed time, and 
she thought to herself, " As I am Miss Susan 
Winstanley, and a young lady— a reputed 
beauty, and known to be a fortune— I can 
have my choice of the finest speeches from 
the mouth of this very fine gentleman who 
is courting me— but if I had been poor Mary 
Such-a-one (naming the milliner),— and had 
failed of bringing home the cravats to the 
appointed hour— though perhaps I had sat 
up half the night to forward them— what 
sort of compliments should I have received 
then?— And my woman's pride came to 
my assistance; and I thought, that if it 
were only to do me honor, a female, 
like myself, might have received hand- 
somer usage; and I was determined not to 
accept any fine speeches to the compro- 
mise of that sex, the belonging to which 
197 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



was after all my strongest claim and title 
to them." 

I think the lady discovered both generos- 
ity, and a just way of thinking, in this re- 
buke which she gave her lover; and I have 
sometimes imagined, that the uncommon 
strain of courtesy, which through life regu- 
lated the actions and behavior of my friend 
towards all of womankind indiscriminately, 
owed its happy origin to this seasonable 
lesson from the lips of his lamented mis- 
tress. 

I wish the whole female world would 
entertain the same notion of these things 
that Miss Winstanley showed. Then we 
should see something of the spirit of con- 
sistent gallantry; and no longer witness the 
anomaly of the same man— a pattern of 
true politeness to a wife— of cold contempt, 
or rudeness, to a sister— the idolater of his 
female mistress— the disparager and de- 
spiser of his no less female aunt, or unfor- 
tunate—still female— maiden cousin. Just 
so much respect as a woman derogates from 
her own sex, in whatever condition placed 
— her handmaid, or dependent — she de- 
serves to have diminished from herself on 
that score; and probably will feel the diminu- 
tion, when youth, and beauty, and advan- 
tages, not inseparable from sex, shall lose 
198 



MODERN GALLANTRY 



of their attraction. What a woman should 
demand of a man in courtship, or after it, 
is first— respect for her as she is a woman; 
—and next to that— to Tbe respected by him 
above all other women. But let her stand 
upon her female character as upon a foun- 
dation; and let the attentions, incident to 
individual preference, be so many pretty 
additaments and ornaments— as many, and 
as fanciful, as you please— to that main 
structure. Let her first lesson be with 
sweet Susan Winstanley— to reverence her 
sex. 



199 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE 
INNER TEMPLE 



I WAS born, and passed the first seven 
years of my life, in the Temple. Its 
church, its halls, its gardens, its foun- 
tains, its river, I had almost said— for in 
those young years, what was this king of 
rivers to me hut a stream that watered our 
pleasant places?— these are of my oldest 
recollections. I repeat, to this day, no 
verses to myself more frequently, or with 
kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, 
where he speaks of this spot:— 

There when they came, whereas those bricky 

towers, 
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth 

ride, 
Where now the studious lawyers have their 

bowers, 
There whylome wont the Templer knights to 

bide, 
Till they decayed through pride. 

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the 
metropolis. What a transition for a coun- 
tryman visiting London for the first time— 
the passing from the crowded Strand or 
200 



OLD BENCHERS OF INNER TEMPLE 

Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into 
its magnificent ample squares, its classic 
green recesses! What a cheerful, liberal 
look hath that portion of it, which, from 
three sides, overlooks the greater garden; 
that goodly pile 

Of building strong, albeit of Paper bight, 

confronting with massy contrast the 
lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded 
one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful 
Crown Office Row (place of my kindly en- 
gendure), right opposite the stately stream, 
which washes the garden-foot with her yet 
scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems 
but just weaned from her Twickenham 
Naiades! a man would give something to 
have been born in such places. What a 
collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan 
hall, where the fountain plays, which I have 
made to rise and fall, how many times! to 
the astoundment of the young urchins, 
my contemporaries, who, not being able to 
guess at its recondite machinery, were al- 
most tempted to hail the wondrous work as 
magic! What an antique air had the now 
almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral 
inscriptions, seeming coevals with that 
Time which they measured, and to take 
201 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



their revelations of its flight immediately 
from heaven, holding correspondence with 
the fountain of light! How would the dark 
line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the 
eye of childhood, eager to detect its move- 
ment, never catched, nice as an evanescent 
cloud, or the first arrests of sleep! 

Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial hand 

Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! 

What a dead thing is a clock, with its 
ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, 
its pert or solemn dullness of communica- 
tion, compared with the simple altar-like 
structure and silent heart-language of the 
old dial! It stood as the garden god of 
Christian gardens. Why is it almost every- 
where vanished? If its business use be 
superseded by more elaborate inventions, 
its moral uses, its beauty, might have 
pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of 
moderate labors, of pleasures not protracted 
after sunset, of temperance, and good hours. 
It was the primitive clock, the horologe of 
the first world. Adam could scarce have 
missed it in Paradise. It was the measure 
appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to 
spring by, for the birds to apportion their 
silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture 
202 



OLD BENCHERS OF INNER TEMPLE 

and be led to fold by. The shepherd " carved 
it out quaintly in the sun"; and, turning 
philosopher by the very occupation, pro- 
vided it with mottos more touching than 
tombstones. It was a pretty device of the 
gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the 
days of artificial gardening, made a dial out 
of herbs and flowers. I must quote his 
verses a little higher up, for they are full, 
as all his serious poetry was, of a witty 
delicacy. They will not come in awkwardly, 
I hope, in a talk of fountains and sun-dials. 
He is speaking of sweet garden scenes:— 

What wondrous life is this I lead ! 
Ripe apples drop about my head. 
The luscious clusters of the vine 
Upon my mouth do crush their wine. 
The nectarine, and curious peach, 
Into my hands themselves do reach. 
Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. 
Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less 
Withdraws into its happiness. 
The mind, that ocean, where each kind 
Does straight its own resemblance find ; 
Yet it creates, transcending these. 
Far other worlds and other seas ; 
Annihilating all that 's made 
To a green thought in a green shade. 
Here at the fountain's sliding foot 
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, 
Casting the body's vest aside. 
My soul into the boughs does glide ; 

203 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



There, like a bird, it sits and sings, 
Then whets and claps its silver wings, 
And, till prepared for longer flight. 
Waves in its plumes the various light. 
How well the skilful gardener drew 
Of flowers and herbs, this dial new 
Where, from above, the milder sun 
Does through a fragrant zodiac run : 
And, as it works, the industrious bee 
Computes its time as well as we. 
How could such sweet and wholesome hours 
Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers? ^ 

The artificial fountains of the metropohs 
are, in like manner, fast vanishing. Most 
of them are dried up or hricked over. Yet, 
where one is left, as in that little green 
nook behind the South Sea House, what a 
freshness it gives to the dreary pile! Four 
little winged marble boys used to play their 
virgin fancies, spouting out ever fresh 
streams from their innocent-wanton lips in 
the square of Lincoln's Inn, when I was no 
bigger than they were figured. They are 
gone, and the spring choked up. The fash- 
ion, they tell me, is gone by, and these 
things are esteemed childish. Why not, 
then, gratify children, by letting them 
stand? Lawyers, I suppose, were children 
once. They are awakening images to them 
at least. Why must everything smack of 

1 From a copy of verses entitled " The Garden," 

204 



OLD BENCHERS OF INNER TEMPLE 

man, and mannish? Is the world all grown 
up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in 
the bosoms of the wisest and the best some 
of the child's heart left, to respond to its 
earliest enchantments? The figures were 
grotesque. Are the stiff-wigged living fig- 
ures, that still flitter and chatter about that 
area, less Gothic in appearance? or is the 
splutter of their hot rhetoric one half so re- 
freshing and innocent as the little cool play- 
ful streams those exploded cherubs uttered? 

They have lately Gothicized the entrance 
to the Inner Temple hall, and the library 
front; to assimilate them, I suppose, to the 
body of the hall, which they do not at all 
resemble. What is become of the winged 
horse that stood over the former? a stately 
arms! and who has removed those frescos 
of the Virtues, which Italianized the end of 
the Paper-buildings?— my first hint of alle- 
gory! They must account to me for these 
things, which I miss so greatly. 

The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used 
to call the parade; but the traces are passed 
away of the footsteps which made its pave- 
ment awful! It is become common and 
profane. The old benchers had it almost 
sacred to themselves, in the fore part of 
the day at least. They might not be sided 
or jostled. Their air and dress asserted the 
205 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



parade. You left wide spaces betwixt you 
when you passed them. We walk on even 
terms with their successors. The roguish 

eye of J 11, ever ready to he delivered of 

a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie a 
repartee with it. But what insolent familiar 
durst have mated Thomas Coventry?— 
whose person was a quadrate, his step 
massy and elephantine, his face square as 
the lion's, his gait peremptory and path- 
keeping, indivertible from his way as a 
moving column, the scarecrow of his in- 
feriors, the browbeater of equals and su- 
periors, who made a solitude of children 
wherever he came, for they fled his insuffer- 
able presence, as they would have shunned 
an Elisha bear. His growl was as thunder 
in their ears, whether he spake to them in 
mirth or in rebuke; his invitatory notes 
being, indeed, of all, the most repulsive and 
horrid. Clouds of snuff, aggravating the 
natural terrors of his speech, broke from 
each majestic nostril, darkening the air. 
He took it, not by pinches, but a palmful at 
once,— diving for it under the mighty flaps 
of his old-fashioned waistcoat pocket; his 
waistcoat red and angry, his coat dark 
rappee, tinctured by dye original, and by 
adjuncts, with buttons of obsolete gold. 
And so he paced the terrace. 
206 



OLD BENCHERS OF INNER TEMPLE 

By his side a milder form was sometimes 
to be seen; the pensive gentility of Samuel 
Salt. They were coevals, and had nothing 
but that and their benchership in common. 
In politics Salt was a Whig, and Coventry a 
stanch Tory. Many a sarcastic growl did 
the latter cast out— for Coventry had a 
rough spinous humor— at the political con- 
federates of his associate, which rebounded 
from the gentle bosom of the latter like 
cannon-balls from wool. You could not 
ruffle Samuel Salt. 

S. had the reputation of being a very 
clever man, and of excellent discernment in 
the chamber practice of the law. I suspect 
his knowledge did not amount to much. 
When a case of difficult disposition of 
money, testamentary or otherwise, came 
before him, he ordinarily handed it over, 
with a few instructions, to his man Lovel, 
who was a quick little fellow, and would 
despatch it out of hand by the light of natu- 
ral understanding, of which he had an un- 
common share. It was incredible what 
repute for talents S. enjoyed by the mere 
trick of gravity. He was a shy man; a child 
might pose him in a minute— indolent and 
procrastinating to the last degree. Yet 
men would give him credit for vast appli- 
cation, in spite of himself. He was not 
207 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



to be trusted with himself with impunity. 
He never dressed for a dinner-party but he 
forgot his sword— they wore swords then— 
or some other necessary part of his equi- 
page. Lovel had his eye upon him on all 
these occasions, and ordinarily gave him 
his cue. If there was anything which he 
could speak unseasonably, he was sure to 
do it.— He was to dine at a relative's of the 
unfortunate Miss Blandy on the day of her 
execution;— and L., who had a wary fore- 
sight of his probable hallucinations, before 
he set out schooled him, with great anxiety, 
not in any possible manner to allude to her 
story that day. S. promised faithfully to 
observe the injunction. He had not been 
seated in the parlor, where the company 
was expecting the dinner summons, four 
minutes, when, a pause in the conversation 
ensuing, he got up, looked out of window, 
and pulling down his ruffles— an ordinary 
motion with him— observed, "it was a 
gloomy day," and added, " Miss Blandy must 
be hanged by this time, I suppose." In- 
stances of this sort were perpetual. Yet 
S. was thought by some of the greatest 
men of his time a fit person to be consulted, 
not alone in matters pertaining to the law, 
but in the ordinary niceties and embarrass- 
ments of conduct— from force of manner 
208 



OLD BENCHERS OF INNER TEMPLE 

entirely. He never laughed. He had the 
same good fortune among the female world, 
—was a known toast with the ladies, and 
one or two are said to have died for love of 
him— I suppose, because he never trifled or 
talked gallantly with them, or paid them, 
indeed, hardly common attentions. He had 
a fine face and person, but wanted, me- 
thought, the spirit that should have shown 
them off with advantage to the women. 
His eye lacked luster.— Not so, thought 

Susan P ; who, at the advanced age of 

sixty, was seen, in the cold evening-time, 
unaccompanied, wetting the pavement of 

B d Row, with tears that fell in drops 

which might be heard, because her friend 
had died that day— he, whom she had pur- 
sued with a hopeless passion for the last 
forty years— a passion which years could 
not extinguish or abate; nor the long-re- 
solved, yet gently enforced, puttings off of 
unrelenting bachelorhood dissuade from its 

cherished purpose. Mild Susan P , thou 

hast now thy friend in heaven! 

Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the 
noble family of that name. He passed his 
youth in contracted circumstances, which 
gave him early those parsimonious habits 
which in after life never forsook him; so 
that with one windfall or another, about 
^* 209 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



the time I knew him, he was master of four 
or five hundred thousand pounds; nor did 
he look or walk worth a moidore less. He 
lived in a gloomy house opposite the pump 
in Serjeant's Inn, Fleet Street. J., the 
counsel, is doing self-imposed penance in 
it, for what reason I divine not, at this day. 
C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, 
where he seldom spent above a day or two 
at a time in the summer; but preferred, 
during the hot months, standing at his 
window in this damp, close, well-like man- 
sion, to watch, as he said, " the maids draw- 
ing water all day long." I suspect he had 
his within-door reasons for the preference. 
Hie eurrus et armafuere. He might think 
his treasures more safe. His house had the 
aspect of a strong box. C. was a close 
hunks— a hoarder rather than a miser— or, 
if a miser, none of the mad Elwes breed, 
who have brought discredit upon a char- 
acter which cannot exist without certain 
admirable points of steadiness and unity of 
purpose. One may hate a true miser, but 
cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. 
By taking care of the pence he is often 
enabled to part with the pounds, upon a 
scale that leaves us careless generous fel- 
lows halting at an immeasurable distance 
behind, C. gave away 30,000 Z. at once in 
210 



OLD BENCHERS OP INNER TEMPLE 

his lifetime to a blind charity. His house- 
keeping was severely looked after, hut he 
kept the table of a gentleman. He would 
know who came in and who went out of his 
house, hut his kitchen chimney was never 
suffered to freeze. 

Salt was his opposite in this, as in all— 
never knew what he was worth in the world; 
and having but a competency for his rank, 
which his indolent habits were little calcu- 
lated to improve, might have suffered se- 
verely if he had not had honest people about 
him. Lovel took care of everything. He 
was at once his clerk, his good servant, his 
dresser, his friend, his "flapper," his guide, 
stop-watch, auditor, treasurer. He did no- 
thing without consulting Lovel, or failed 
in anything without expecting and fearing 
his admonishing. He put himself almost 
too much in his hands, had they not been 
the purest in the world. He resigned his 
title almost to respect as a master, if L. 
could ever have forgotten for a moment 
that he was a servant. 

I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an 
incorrigible and losing honesty. A good 
fellow withal, and "would strike." In the 
cause of the oppressed he never considered 
inequalities, or calculated the number of 
his opponents. He once wrested a sword 
211 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



out of the hand of a man of quality that 
had drawn upon him, and pommeled him 
severely with the hilt of it. The swordsman 
had offered insult to a female— an occasion 
upon which no odds against him could have 
prevented the interference of Lovel. He 
would stand next day bareheaded to the 
same person modestly to excuse his inter- 
ference—for L. never forgot rank where 
something better was not concerned. L. 
was the liveliest little fellow breathing, had 
a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was 
said greatly to resemble (I have a portrait 
of him which confirms it), possessed a fine 
turn for humorous poetry— next to Swift 
and Prior— molded heads in clay or plaster 
of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural 
genius merely; turned cribbage-boards, and 
such small cabinet toys, to perfection; took 
a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal 
facility; made punch better than any man 
of his degree in England; had the merriest 
quips and conceits; and was altogether as 
brimful of rogueries and inventions as you 
could desire. He was a brother of the 
angle, moreover, and just such a free, 
hearty, honest companion as Mr. Izaak 
Walton would have chosen to go a-fishing 
with. I saw him in his old age and the 
decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the 
212 



OLD BENCHERS OP INNER TEMPLE 

last sad stage of human weakness— "a rem- 
nant most forlorn of what he was,"— yet 
even then his eye would light up upon the 
mention of his favorite Garrick. He was 
greatest, he would say, in Bayes— " was upon 
the stage nearly throughout the whole per- 
formance, and as busy as a bee." At inter- 
vals, too, he would speak of his former life, 
and how he came up a little boy from Lin- 
coln, to go to service, and how his mother 
cried at parting with him, and how he re- 
turned, after some few years' absence, in 
his smart new livery, to see her, and she 
blest herself at the change, and could hardly 
be brought to believe that it was " her own 
bairn." And then, the excitement subsid- 
ing, he would weep, till I have wished that 
sad second-childhood might have a mother 
still to lay its head upon her lap. But the 
common mother of us all in no long time 
after received him gently into hers. 

With Coventry and with Salt, in their 
walks upon the terrace, most commonly 
Peter Pier son would join to make up a third. 
They did not walk linked arm in arm in 
those days— "as now our stout triumvirs 
sweep the streets,"— but generally with 
both hands folded behind them for state, 
or with one at least behind, the other carry- 
ing a cane. P. was a benevolent, but not a 
213 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



prepossessing man. He had that in his face 
which you could not term unhappiness; it 
rather implied an incapacity of being happy. 
His cheeks were colorless, even to white- 
ness. His look was uninviting, resembling 
(but without his sourness) that of our great 
philanthropist. I know that he did good 
acts, but I could never make out what he 
was. Contemporary with these, but sub- 
ordinate, was Daines Barrington— another 
oddity— he walked burly and square— in 
imitation, I think, of Coventry— howbeit he 
attained not to the dignity of his prototype. 
Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the 
strength of being a tolerable antiquarian, 
and having a brother a bishop. When the 
account of his year's treasurership came to 
be audited, the following singular charge 
was unanimously disallowed by the bench: 
"Item, disbursed Mr. Allen, the gardener, 
twenty shillings for stuff to poison the 
sparrows, by my orders." Next to him 
was old Barton— a jolly negation, who took 
upon him the ordering of the bills of fare 
for the parliament chamber, where the 
benchers dine— answering to the combina- 
tion-rooms at College— much to the ease- 
ment of his less epicurean brethren. I 
know nothing more of him.— Then Read, 
and Twopenny— Read, good-humored and 
214 



OLD BENCHERS OF INNER TEMPLE 

personable— Twopenny, good-humored, but 
thin, and felicitous in jests upon his own 
figure. If T. was thin, Wharry was attenu- 
ated and fleeting. Many must remember 
him (for he was rather of later date) and 
his singular gait, which was performed by 
three steps and a jump regularly succeed- 
ing. The steps were little efforts, like that 
of a child beginning to walk; the jump com- 
paratively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. 
Where he learned this figure, or what occa- 
sioned it, I could never discover. It was 
neither graceful in itself, nor seemed to 
answer the purpose any better than com- 
mon walking. The extreme tenuity of his 
frame, I suspect, set him upon it. It was 
a trial of poising. Twopenny would often 
rally him upon his leanness, and hail him 
as Brother Lusty; but W. had no relish of 
a joke. His features were spiteful. I have 
heard that he would pinch his cat's ears 
extremely when anything had offended him. 
Jackson— the omniscient Jackson, he was 
called— was of this period. He had the 
reputation of possessing more multifarious 
knowledge than any man of his time. He 
was the Friar Bacon of the less literate 
portion of the Temple. I remember a pleas- 
ant passage of the cook applying to him, 
with much formality of apology, for in- 
215 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



structions how to write down edge bone of 
beef in his bill of commons. He was sup- 
posed to know, if any man in the world did. 
He decided the orthography to be— as I 
have given it— fortifying his authority with 
such anatomical reasons as dismissed the 
manciple (for the time) learned and happy. 
Some do spell it yet, perversely, aitch bone, 
from a fanciful resemblance between its 
shape and that of the aspirate so denomi- 
nated. I had almost forgotten Mingay with 
the iron hand— but he was somewhat later. 
He had lost his right hand by some acci- 
dent, and supplied it with a grappling-hook, 
which he wielded with a tolerable adroit- 
ness. I detected the substitute before I 
was old enough to reason whether it were 
artificial or not. I remember the astonish- 
ment it raised in me. He was a blustering, 
loud-talking person; and I reconciled the 
phenomenon to my ideas as an emblem of 
power— somewhat like the horns in the 
forehead of Michael Angelo's Moses. Baron 
Maseres, who walks (or did till very lately) 
in the costume of the reign of George the 
Second, closes my imperfect recollections 
of the old benchers of the Inner Temple. 

Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled? 
Or, if the like of you exist, why exist they 
no more for me? Ye inexplicable, half- 
216 



OLD BENCHERS OF INNER TEMPLE 

understood appearances, why comes in 
reason to tear away the preternatural mist, 
bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you? 
Why make ye so sorry a figure in my rela- 
tion, who made up to me— to my childish 
eyes— the mythology of the Temple? In 
those days I saw Gods, as " old men covered 
with a mantle," walking upon the earth. 
Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish,— 
extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of 
legendary fabling, in the heart of childhood 
there will, forever, spring up a well of 
innocent or wholesome superstition— the 
seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, 
and vital— from every-day forms educing the 
unknown and the uncommon. In that little 
Goshen there will be light when the grown 
world flounders about in the darkness of 
sense and materiality. While childhood, 
and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall 
be left, imagination shall not have spread 
her holy wings totally to fly the earth. 

P.S.— I have done injustice to the soft 
shade of Samuel Salt. See what it is to 
trust to imperfect memory, and the erring 
notices of childhood ! Yet I protest I always 
thought that he had been a bachelor ! This 
gentleman, R. N. informs me, married 
young, and losing his lady in childbed, 
217 



ESSAYS OF ELI'A 



within the first year of their union, fell into 
adeep melancholy, from the effects of which, 
probably,' he never thoroughly recovered. 
In what a new light does this place his re- 
jection (0 call it by a gentler name!) of mild 

Susan P , unraveling into beauty certain 

peculiarities of this very shy and retiring 
character! Henceforth let no one receive 
the narratives of Elia for true records! 
They are, in truth, but shadows of fact- 
verisimilitudes, not verities— or sitting but 
upon the remote edges and outskirts of 
history. He is no such honest chronicler 
as R. N., and would have done better per- 
haps to have consulted that gentleman 
before he sent these incondite reminiscences 
to press. But the worthy subtreasurer— 
who respects his old and his new masters 
—would but have been puzzled at the inde- 
corous liberties of Elia. The good man 
wots not, peradventure, of the license which 
Magazines have arrived at in this plain- 
speaking age, or hardly dreams of their 
existence beyond the Gentleman's— his fur- 
thest monthly excursions in this nature 
having been long confined to the holy 
ground of honest Urban's obituary. May 
it be long before his own name shall help 
to swell those columns of unenvied flattery! 
—Meantime, ye New Benchers of the 
218 



OLD BENCHERS OF INNER TEMPLE 

Inner Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is 
himself the kindliest of human creatures. 
Should infirmities overtake him— he is yet 
in green and vigorous senility— make al- 
lowances for them, remembering that "ye 
yourselves are old." So may the Winged 
Horse, your ancient badge and cognizance, 
still flourish! so may future Hookers and 
Seldens illustrate your church and cham- 
bers! so may the sparrows, in default of 
more melodious quiristers, unpoisoned hop 
about your walks! so may the fresh-colored 
and cleanly nursery-maid, who, by leave, 
airs her playful charge in your stately gar- 
dens, drop her prettiest blushing courtesy 
as ye pass, reductive of juvenescent emo- 
tion! so may the younkers of this genera- 
tion eye you, pacing your stately terrace, 
with the same superstitious veneration with 
which the child Elia gazed on the Old 
Worthies that solemnized the parade be- 
fore ye! 



219 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 



THE custom of saying grace at meals 
had, probably, its origin in the early 
times of the world, and the hunter- 
state of man, when dinners were precarious 
things, and a full meal was something more 
than a common blessing! when a bellyful 
was a windfall, and looked like a special 
providence. In the shouts and triumphal 
songs with which, after a season of sharp 
abstinence, a lucky booty of deer's or goat's 
flesh would naturally be ushered home, 
existed, perhaps, the germ of the modern 
grace. It is not otherwise easy to be under- 
stood, why the blessing of food— the act of 
eating— should have had a particular ex- 
pression of thanksgiving annexed to it, dis- 
tinct from that implied and silent gratitude 
with which we are expected to enter upon 
the enjoyment of the many other various 
gifts and good things of existence. 

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon 

twenty other occasions in the course of the 

day besides my dinner. I want a form for 

setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a 

220 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 



moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, 
or a solved problem. Why have we none 
for books, those spiritual repasts— a grace 
before Milton— a grace before Shakspere 
—a devotional exercise proper to be said 
before reading the Fairy Queen?— but the 
received ritual having prescribed these 
forms to the solitary ceremony of mandu- 
cation, I shall confine my observations to 
the experience which I have had of the 
grace, properly so called; commending my 
new scheme for extension to a niche in the 
grand philosophical, poetical, and perchance 
in part heretical, liturgy, now compiling by 
my friend Homo Humanus, for the use of 
a certain snug congregation of Utopian 
Rabelaisian Christians, no matter where 
assembled. 

The form, then, of the benediction before 
eating has its beauty at a poor man's table, 
or at the simple and unprovocative repasts 
of children. It is here that the grace be- 
comes exceedingly graceful. The indigent 
man, who hardly knows whether he shall 
have a meal the next day or not, sits down 
to his fare with a present sense of the bless- 
ing, which can be but feebly acted by the 
rich, into whose minds the conception of 
wanting a dinner could never, but by some 
extreme theory, have entered. The proper 
221 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



end of food— the animal sustenance— is 
barely contemplated by them. ^The poor 
man's bread is his daily bread, literally his 
bread for the day. Their courses are peren- 
nial. 

Again, the plainest diet seems the fittest 
to be preceded by the grace. That which is 
least stimulative to appetite, leaves the 
mind most free for foreign considerations. 
A man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, 
over a dish of plain mutton with turnips, 
and have leisure to reflect upon the ordi- 
nance and institution of eating; when he 
shall confess a perturbation of mind, incon- 
sistent with the purposes of the grace, at 
the presence of venison or turtle. When I 
have sate (a varus hospes) at rich men's 
tables, with the savory soup and messes 
steaming up the nostrils, and moistening 
the lips of the guests with desire and a dis- 
tracted choice, I have felt the introduction 
of that ceremony to be unseasonable. With 
the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems 
impertinent to interpose a religious senti- 
ment. It is a confusion of purpose to mut- 
ter out praises from a mouth that waters. 
The heats of epicurism put out the gentle 
flame of devotion. The incense which rises 
round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts 
it for its own. The very excess of the pro- 
222 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 



vision beyond the needs, takes away all 
sense of proportion between the end and 
means. The giver is veiled by his gifts. 
You are startled at the injustice of return- 
ing thanks— for what?— for having too 
much while so many starve. It is to praise 
the Gods amiss. 

I have [observed this awkwardness felt, 
scarce consciously perhaps, by the good 
man who says the grace. I have seen it in 
clergymen and others— a sort of shame— a 
sense of the co-presence of circumstances 
which unhallow the blessing. After a de- 
votional tone put on for a few seconds, how 
rapidly the speaker will fall into his common 
voice ! helping himself or his neighbor, as if 
to get rid of some uneasy sensation of hy- 
pocrisy. Not that the good man was a 
hypocrite, or was not most conscientious in 
the discharge of the duty; but he felt in 
his inmost mind the incompatibility of the 
scene and the viands before him with the 
exercise of a calm and rational gratitude. 

I hear somebody exclaim,— Would you 
have Christians sit down at table like hogs 
to their troughs, without remembering the 
Giver?— no— I would have them sit down as 
Christians, remembering the Giver, and less 
like hogs. Or, if their appetites must run 
riot, and they must pamper themselves 
223 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



with delicacies for which east and west are 
ransacked, I would have them postpone 
their benediction to a fitter season, when 
appetite is laid; when the still small voice 
can he heard, and the reason of the grace 
returns— with temperate diet and restricted 
dishes. Gluttony and surfeiting are no 
proper occasions for thanksgiving. When 
Jeshurun waxed fat, we read that he kicked. 
Virgil knew the harpy-nature better, when 
he put into the mouth of Celaeno anything 
but a blessing. We may be gratefully sen- 
sible of the deliciousness of some kinds of 
food beyond others, though that is a meaner 
and inferior gratitude: but the proper object 
of the grace is sustenance, not relishes; 
daily bread, not delicacies; the means of 
life, and not the means of pampering the 
carcass. With what frame or composure, 
I wonder, can a city chaplain pronounce his 
benediction at some great Hall-feast, when 
he knows that his last concluding pious 
word— and that, in all probability, the sacred 
name which he preaches— is but the signal 
for so many impatient harpies to commence 
their foul orgies, with as little sense of true 
thankfulness (which is temperance) as those 
Virgilian fowl ! It is well if the good man 
himself does not feel his devotions a little 
clouded, those foggy sensuous steams min- 
224 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 



gling with and polluting the pure altar sac- 
rifice. 

The severest satire upon full tables and 
surfeits is the banquet which Satan, in the 
Paradise Regained, provides for a tempta- 
tion in the wilderness: 

A table richly spread in regal mode 
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort 
And savor ; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, 
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, 
Gris-amber-steamed ; all fish from sea or shore. 
Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained 
Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. 

The Tempter, I warrant you, thought 
these cates would go down without the 
recommendatory preface of a benediction. 
They are like to be short graces where the 
devil plays the host.— I am afraid the poet 
wants his usual decorum in this place. 
Was he thinking of the old Roman luxury, 
or of a gaudy day at Cambridge? This was 
a temptation fitter for a Heliogabalus. The 
whole banquet is too civic and culinary, 
and the accompaniments altogether a 
profanation of that deep, abstracted, holy 
scene. The mighty artillery of sauces, 
which the cook-fiend conjures up, is out of 
proportion to the simple wants and plain 
hunger of the guest. He that disturbed 
him in his dreams, from his dreams might 
15 225 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



have been taught better. To the temperate 
fantasies of the famished Son of God, what 
sort of feasts presented themselves?— He 
dreamed indeed, 

—As appetite is wont to dream, 

Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment sweet. 

But what meats?— 

Him thought he by the brook of Cherith stood, 
And saw the ravens with their horny beaks 
Food to Elijah bringing even and morn ; 
Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what 

they brought. 
He saw the prophet also how he fled 
Into the desert, and how there he slept 
Under a juniper ; then how awaked 
He found his supper on the coals prepared, 
And by the angel was bid rise and eat, 
And ate the second time after repose, 
The strength whereof sufficed him forty days : 
Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook. 
Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse. 

Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than 
these temperate dreams of the divine Hun- 
gerer. To which of these two visionary 
banquets, think you, would the introduction 
of what is called the grace have been most 
fitting and pertinent? 

Theoretically I am no enemy to graces; 
but practically I own that (before meat 
especially) they seem to involve something 
226 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 



awkward and unseasonable. Our appetites, 
of one or another kind, are excellent spurs 
to our reason, which might otherwise but 
feebly set about the great ends of preserving 
and continuing the species. They are fit 
blessings to be contemplated at a distance 
with a becoming gratitude; but the moment 
of appetite (the judicious reader will appre- 
hend me) is, perhaps, the least fit season 
for that exercise. The Quakers, who go 
about their business of every description 
with more calmness than we, have more 
title to the use of these benedictory pref- 
aces. I have always admired their silent 
grace, and the more because I have ob- 
served their applications to the meat and 
drink following to be less passionate and 
sensual than ours. They are neither glut- 
tons nor winebibbers as a people. They 
eat, as a horse bolts his chopped hay, with 
indifference, calmness, and cleanly circum- 
stances. They neither grease nor slop 
themselves. When I see a citizen in his 
bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a sur- 
plice. 

I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I 
am not indifferent to the kinds of it. Those 
unctuous morsels of deer's flesh were not 
made to be received with dispassionate 
services. I hate a man who swallows it, 
227 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



affecting not to know what he is eating. 
I suspect his taste in higher matters. I 
shrink instinctively from one who professes 
to hke minced veal. There is a physiog- 
nomical character in the tastes for food. 

C holds that a man cannot have a pure 

mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am 
not certain but he is right. With the decay 
of my first innocence, I confess a less and 
less relish daily for those innocuous cates. 
The whole vegetable tribe have lost their 
gust with me. Only I stick to asparagus, 
which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. 
I am impatient and querulous under culi- 
nary disappointments, as to come home at 
the dinner-hour, for instance, expecting 
some savory mess, and to find one quite 
tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill melted 
— that commonest of kitchen failures — puts 
me beside my tenor.— The author of the 
Rambler used to make inarticulate animal 
noises over a favorite food. Was this the 
music quite proper to be preceded by the 
grace? or would the pious man have done 
better to postpone his devotions to a season 
when the blessing might be contemplated 
with less perturbation? I quarrel with no 
man's tastes, nor would set my thin face 
against those excellent things, in their way, 
j ollity and feasting. But as these exercises, 
228 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 



however laudable, have little in them of 
grace or gracefulness, a man should be sure, 
before he ventures so to grace them, that 
while he is pretending his devotions other- 
where, he is not secretly kissing his hand 
to some great fish — his Dagon — with a 
special consecration of no ark but the fat 
tureen before him. Graces are the sweet 
preluding strains to the banquets of angels 
and children; to the roots and severer re- 
pasts of the Chartreuse; to the slender, but 
not slenderly acknowledged, refection of 
the poor and humble man: but at the 
heaped-up boards of the pampered and the 
luxurious they become of dissonant mood, 
less timed and tuned to the occasion, me- 
thinks, than the noise of those better be- 
fitting organs would be which children hear 
tales of, at Hog's Norton. We sit too long 
at our meals, or are too curious in the study 
of them, or too disordered in our application 
to them, or engross too great a portion of 
those good things (which should be com- 
mon) to our share, to be able with any grace 
to say grace. To be thankful for what we 
grasp exceeding our proportion, is to add 
hypocrisy to injustice. A lurking sense of 
this truth is what makes the performance 
of this duty so cold and spiritless a service 
at most tables. In houses where the grace 
229 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



is as indispensable as the napkin, who has 
not seen that never-settled question arise, 
as to who shall say it ? while'lihe good man 
of the house and the visitor clergyman, or 
some other guest belike of next authority, 
from years or gravity, shall be bandying 
^bout the office between them as a matter 
of compliment, each of them not unwilling 
to shift the awkward burden of an equivo- 
cal duty from his own shoulders? 

I once drank tea in company with two 
Methodist divines of different persuasions, 
whom it was my fortune to introduce to 
each other for the first time that evening. 
Before the first cup was handed round, one 
of these reverend gentlemen put it to the 
other, with all due solemnity, whether he 
chose to say anything. It seems it is the 
custom with some sectaries to put up a 
short prayer before this meal also. His 
reverend brother did not at first quite ap- 
prehend him, but upon an explanation, with 
little less importance he made answer that 
it was not a custom known in his church: 
in which courteous evasion the other ac- 
quiescing for good manners' sake, or in 
compliance with a weak brother, the sup- 
plementary or tea grace was waived alto- 
gether. With what spirit might not Lucian 
have painted two priests, of his religion, 
230 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 



playing into each other's hands the com- 
pHment of performing or omitting a sacri- 
fice,— the hungry God meantime, doubtful 
of his incense, with expectant nostrils 
hovering over the two flamens, and (as be- 
tween two stools) going away in the end 
without his supper. 

A short form upon these occasions is felt 
to want reverence; a long one, I am afraid, 
cannot escape the charge of impertinence. 
I do not quite approve of the epigrammatic 
conciseness with which that equivocal wag 
(but my pleasant school-fellow) C. V. L., 
when importuned for a grace, used to in- 
quire, first slyly leering down the table, " Is 
there no clergyman here?"— significantly 

adding, " Thank G ." Nor do I think our 

old form at school quite pertinent, where 
we were used to preface our bald bread-and- 
cheese suppers with a preamble, connecting 
with that humble blessing a recognition of 
benefits the most awful and overwhelming 
to the imagination which religion has to 
offer. Non tunc illis erat locus. I remem- 
ber we were put to it to reconcile the phrase 
" good creatures," upon which the blessing 
rested, with the fare set before us, wilfully 
understanding that expression in a low and 
animal sense,— till some one recalled a le- 
gend, which told how, in the golden days of 
231 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



Christ's, the young Hospitalers were wont 
to have smoking joints of roast meat upon 
their nightly hoards, till some pious bene- 
factor, commiserating the decencies, rather 
than the palates, of the children, commuted 
our flesh for garments, and gave us— hor- 
resco refer ens— trousers instead of mutton. 



232 



DREAM CHILDREN; A REVERIE 



CHILDREN love to listen to, stories 
about their elders, when they were 
children; to stretch their imagination 
to the conception of a traditionary great- 
uncle, or grandame, whom they never saw. 
It was in this spirit that my little ones crept 
about me the other evening to hear about 
their great-grandmother Field, who lived in 
a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times 
bigger than that in which they and papa 
lived) which had been the scene— so at least 
it was generally believed in that part of the 
country— of the tragic incidents which they 
had lately become familiar with from the 
ballad of the Children in the Wood. Cer- 
tain it is that the whole story of the chil- 
dren and their cruel uncle was to be seen 
fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney- 
piece of the great hall, the whole story 
down to the Robin Redbreasts; till a foolish 
rich person pulled it down to set up a 
marble one of modern invention in its stead, 
with no story upon it. Here Alice put out 
one of her dear mother's looks, too tender 
233 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



to be called upbraiding. Then I went on to 
say, how religious and how good their great- 
grandmother Field was, how beloved and 
respected by everybody, though she was not 
indeed the mistress of this great house, but 
had only the charge of it (and yet in some 
respects she might be said to be the mis- 
tress of it too) committed to her by the 
owner, who preferred living in a newer and 
more fashionable mansion which he had 
purchased somewhere in the adjoining 
county; but still she lived in it in a manner 
as if it had been her own, and kept up the 
dignity of the great house in a sort while 
she lived, which afterwards came to decay, 
and was nearly pulled down, and all its old 
ornaments stripped and carried away to the 
owner's other house, where they were set 
up, and looked as awkward as if some one 
were to carry away the old tombs they had 
seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up 
in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. 
Here John smiled, as much as to say, " that 
would be foolish indeed." And then I told 
how, when she came to die, her funeral was 
attended by a concourse of all the poor, and 
some of the gentry too, of the neighborhood 
for many miles round, to show their respect 
for her memory, because she had been such 
a good and religious woman; so good indeed 
234 



DREAM CHILDREN; A REVERIE 

that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, aye, 
and a great part of the Testament besides. 
Here little Alice spread her hands. Then I 
told what a tall, upright, graceful person 
their great-grandmother Field once was; 
and how in her youth she was esteemed the 
best dancer— here Alice's little right foot 
played an involuntary movement, till, upon 
my looking grave, it desisted— the best 
dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a 
cruel disease, called a cancer, came, and 
bowed her down with pain; but it could 
never bend her good spirits, or make them 
stoop, but they were still upright, because 
she was so good and religious. Then I told 
how she was used to sleep by herself in a 
lone chamber of the great lone house; and 
how she believed that an apparition of two 
infants was to be seen at midnight gliding 
up and down the great staircase near where 
she slept, but she said "those innocents 
would do her no harm "; and how frightened 
I used to be, though in those days I had my 
maid to sleep with me, because I was never 
half so good or religious as she— and yet I 
never saw the infants. Here John expanded 
all his eyebrows and tried to look coura- 
geous. Then I told how good she was to 
all her grandchildren, having us to the great 
house in the holydays, where I in particular 
235 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



used to spend many hours by myself, in 
gazing upon the old busts of the twelve 
Csesars, that had been Emperors of Rome, 
till the old marble heads would seem to live 
again, or I to be turned into marble with 
them; how I never could be tired with roam- 
ing about that huge mansion, with its vast 
empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, 
fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken panels, 
with the gilding almost rubbed out— some- 
times in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, 
which I had almost to myself, unless when 
now and then a solitary gardening-man 
would cross me— and how the nectarines 
and peaches hung upon the walls, without 
my ever offering to pluck them, because 
they were forbidden fruit, unless now and 
then,— and because I had more pleasure in 
strolling about among the old melancholy- 
looking yew-trees, or the firs, and picking 
up the red berries, and the fir-apples, which 
were good for nothing but to look at— or in 
lying about upon the fresh grass with all 
the fine garden smells around me— or bask- 
ing in the orangery, till I could almost 
fancy myself ripening too along with the 
oranges and the limes in that grateful 
warmth — or in watching the dace that 
darted to and fro in the fish-pond, at the 
bottom of the garden, with here and there 
236 



DREAM CHILDREN; A REVERIE 

a great sulky pike hanging midway down 
the water in silent state, as if it mocked at 
their impertinent friskings,— I had more 
pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than 
in all the sweet flavors of peaches, necta- 
rines, oranges, and such-like common baits 
of children. Here John slyly deposited back 
upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, 
not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated 
dividing with her, and both seemed willing 
to relinquish them for the present as irrel- 
evant. Then, in somewhat a more height- 
ened tone, I told how, though their great- 
grandmother Field loved all her grandchil- 
dren, yet in an especial manner she might 

be said to love their uncle, John L , 

because he was so handsome and spirited a 
youth, and a king to the rest of us; and, 
instead of moping about in solitary corners, 
like some of us, he would mount the most 
mettlesome horse he could get, when but 
an imp no bigger than themselves, and make 
it carry him half over the county in a morn- 
ing, and join the hunters when there were 
any out— and yet he loved the old great 
house and gardens too, but had too much 
spirit to be always pent up within their 
boundaries— and how their uncle grew up 
to man's estate as brave as he was hand- 
some, to the admiration of everybody, but 
237 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



of their great-grandmother Field most 
especially; and how he used to carry me 
upon his back when I was a lame-footed boy 
—for he was a good bit older than me— 
many a mile when I could not walk for pain; 
—and how in after life he became lame- 
footed too, and I did not always (I fear) 
make allowances enough for him when he 
was impatient and in pain, nor remember 
sufficiently how considerate he had been to 
me when I was lame-footed; and how when 
he died, though he had not been dead an 
hour, it seemed as if he had died a great 
while ago, such a distance there is betwixt 
life and death; and how I bore his death as 
I thought pretty well at first, but afterwards 
it haunted and haunted me; and though I 
did not cry or take it to heart as some do, 
and as I think he would have done if I had 
died, yet I missed him all day long, and 
knew not till then how much I had loved 
him. I missed his kindness, and I missed 
his crossness, and wished him to be alive 
again, to be quarreling with him (for we 
quarreled sometimes), rather than not have 
him again, and was as uneasy without him, 
as he, their poor uncle, must have been 
when the doctor took off his limb.— Here 
the children fell a-crying, and asked if their 
238 



DREAM CHILDREN; A REVERIE 

little mourning which they had on was not 
for uncle John, and they looked up, and 
prayed me not to go on ahout their uncle, 
but to tell them some stories about their 
pretty dead mother. Then I told how for 
seven long years, in hope sometimes, some- 
times in despair, yet persisting ever, I 

courted the fair Alice W n; and as much 

as children could understand, I explained to 
them what coyness, and difficulty, and de- 
nial, meant in maidens— when suddenly 
turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice 
looked out at her eyes with such a reality 
of re-presentment, that I became in doubt 
which of them stood there before me, or 
whose that bright hair was; and while I 
stood gazing, both the children gradually 
grew fainter to my view, receding, and still 
receding, till nothing at last but two mourn- 
ful features were seen in the uttermost 
distance, which, without speech, strangely 
impressed upon me the effects of speech: 
" We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are 
we children at all. The children of Alice 
call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less 
than nothing, and dreams. We are only 
what might have been, and must wait upon 
the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages 
before we have existence, and a name"— 
239 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



and immediately awaking, I found myself 
quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, 
where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful 
Bridget unchanged by my side— but John 
L. (or James Elia) was gone forever. 



240 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS 

IN A LETTER TO B. F., ESQ., AT SYDNEY, 
NEW SOUTH WALES 



M' 



Y DEAR F.— When I think how wel- 
come the sight of a letter from the 
world where you were born must 
be to you in that strange one to which you 
have been transplanted, I feel some com- 
punctious visitings at my long silence. But, 
indeed, it is no easy effort to set about a 
correspondence at our distance. The weary 
world of waters between us oppresses the 
imagination. It is difficult to conceive how 
a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across 
it. It is a sort of presumption to expect 
that one's thoughts should live so far. It 
is like writing for posterity; and reminds 
me of one of Mrs. Rowe's superscriptions, 
"Alcander to Strephon in the shades." 
Cowley's Post- Angel is no more than would 
be expedient in such an intercourse. One 
drops a packet at Lombard Street, and in 
twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland 
gets it as fresh as if it came in ice. It is 
only like whispering through a long trum- 
pet. But suppose a tube let down from the 
16 241 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



moon, with yourself at one end and the man 
at the other; it would be some balk to the 
spirit of conversation, if you knew that the 
dialogue exchanged with that interesting 
theosophist would take two or three revolu- 
tions of a higher luminary in its passage. 
Yet, for aught I know, you may be some 
parasangs nigher that primitive idea— 
Plato's man— than we in England here have 
the honor to reckon ourselves. 

Epistolary matter usually compriseth 
three topics; news, sentiment, and puns. 
In the latter, I include all non-serious sub- 
jects; or subjects serious in themselves, 
but treated after my fashion, non-seriously. 
—And first, for news. In them the most 
desirable circumstance, I suppose, is that 
they shall be true. But what security can 
I have that what I now send you for truth 
shall not, before you get it, unaccountably 
turn into a lie? For instance, our mutual 
friend P. is at this present writing— my 
Now— in good health, and enjoys a fair 
share of worldly reputation. You are glad 
to hear it. This is natural and friendly. 
But at this present reading— your Now— he 
may possibly be in the Bench, or going to 
be hanged, which in reason ought to abate 
something of your transport (i.e., at hearing 
he was well, etc.), or at least considerably 
242 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS 

to modify it. I am going to the play this 
evening, to have a laugh with Munden. 
You have no theater, I think you told me, 
in your land of d d realities. You natu- 
rally lick your lips, and envy me my felicity. 
Think but a moment, and you will correct 
the hateful emotion. Why, it is Sunday 
morning with you, and 1823. This confu- 
sion of tenses, this grand solecism of two 
presents, is in a degree common to all pos- 
tage. But if I sent you word to Bath or De- 
vizes, that I was expecting the aforesaid 
treat this evening, though at the moment 
you received the intelligence my full feast 
of fun would he over, yet there would he for 
a day or two after, as you would well know, 
a smack, a relish left upon my mental 
palate, which would give rational encour- 
agement for you to foster a portion, at 
least, of the disagreeable passion, which it 
was in part my intention to produce. But 
ten months hence, your envy or your sym- 
pathy would be as useless as a passion spent 
upon the dead. Not only does truth, in 
these long intervals, unessence herself, but 
(what is harder) one cannot venture a crude 
fiction, for the fear that it may ripen into 
a truth upon the voyage. What a wild im- 
probable banter I put upon you, some three 
years since,— of Will Weatherall having 
243 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



married a servant-maid! I remember 
gravely consulting you how we were to 
receive her— for Will's wife was in no case 
to be rejected; and your no less serious 
replication in the matter; how tenderly 
you advised an abstemious introduction of 
literary topics before the lady, with a cau- 
tion not to be too forward in bringing on 
the carpet matters more within the sphere 
of her intelligence; your deliberate judg- 
ment, or rather wise suspension of sentence, 
how far jacks, and spits, and mops could, 
with propriety, be introduced as subjects; 
whether the conscious avoiding of all such 
matters in discourse would not have a worse 
look than the taking of them casually in our 
way; in what manner we should carry our- 
selves to our maid Becky, Mrs. William 
Weatherall being by; whether we should 
show more delicacy, and a truer sense of 
respect for WilPs wife, by treating Becky 
with our customary chiding before her, or 
by an unusual deferential civility paid to 
Becky, as to a person of great worth, but 
thrown by the caprice of fate into a humble 
station. There were difficulties, I remem- 
ber, on both sides, which you did me the 
favor to state with the precision of a lawyer, 
united to the tenderness of a friend. I 
laughed in my sleeve at your solemn plead- 
244 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS 

ings, when lo! while I was valuing myself 
upon this flam put upon you in New South 
Wales, the devil in England, jealous pos- 
sibly of any lie-children not his own, or 
working after my copy, has actually insti- 
gated our friend (not three days since) to 
the commission of a matrimony, which I 
had only conjured up for your diversion. 
William Weatherall has married Mrs. Cot- 
terel's maid. But to take it in its truest 
sense, you will see, my dear F., that news 
from me must become history to you; which 
I neither profess to write, nor indeed care 
much for reading. No person, under a di- 
viner, can, with any prospect of veracity, 
conduct a correspondence at such an arm's- 
length. Two prophets, indeed, might thus 
interchange intelligence with effect; the 
epoch of the writer (Habakkuk) falling in 
with the true present time of the receiver 
(Daniel); but then we are no prophets. 

Then as to sentiment. It fares little 
better with that. This kind of dish, above 
all, requires to be served up hot, or sent off 
in water-plates, that your friend may have 
it almost as warm as yourself. If it have 
time to cool, it is the most tasteless of all 
cold meats. I have often smiled at a con- 
ceit of the late Lord C. It seems that trav- 
eling somewhere about Geneva, he came 
245 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



to some pretty green spot, or nook, where 
a willow, or something, hung so fantasti- 
cally and invitingly over a stream— was it? 
—or a rock?— no matter— hut the stillness 
and the repose, after a weary journey, 't is 
likely, in a languid moment of his Lordship's 
hot, restless life, so took his fancy that he 
could imagine no place so proper, in the 
event of his death, to lay his hones in. This 
was all very natural and excusable as a sen- 
timent, and shows his character in a very 
pleasing light. But when from a passing 
sentiment it came to he an act; and when, 
by a positive testamentary disposal, his re- 
mains were actually carried all that way 
from England; who was there, some desper- 
ate sentimentalists excepted, that did not 
ask the question, Why could not his Lord- 
ship have found a spot as solitary, a nook 
as romantic, a tree as green and pendent, 
with a stream as emblematic to his purpose, 
in Surrey, in Dorset, or in Devon? Con- 
ceive the sentiment boarded up, freighted, 
entered at the Custom House (startling the 
tide-waiters with the novelty), hoisted into 
a ship. Conceive it pawed about and han- 
dled between the rude jests of tarpaulin 
ruffians— a thing of its delicate texture— 
the salt bilge wetting it till it became as 
vapid as a damaged lustring. Suppose it 
246 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS 

in material danger (mariners have some 
superstition about sentiments) of being 
tossed over in a fresh gale to some propitia- 
tory shark (spirit of Saint Gothard, save us 
from a quietus so foreign to the deviser's 
purpose !), but it has happily evaded a fishy 
consummation. Trace it then to its lucky 
landing— at Lyons shall we say?— I have 
not the map before me— jostled upon four 
men's shoulders— baiting at this town— 
stopping to refresh at t' other village— wait- 
ing a passport here, a license there; the 
sanction of the magistracy in this district, 
the concurrence of the ecclesiastics in that 
canton; till at length it arrives at its desti- 
nation, tired out and jaded, from a brisk 
sentiment into a feature of silly pride or 
tawdry senseless affectation. How few sen- 
timents, my dear F., I am afraid we can set 
down, in the sailor's phrase, as quite sea- 
worthy. 

Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which 
though contemptible in bulk, are the twin- 
kling corpuscula which should irradiate a 
right friendly epistle— your puns and small 
jests are, I apprehend, extremely circum- 
scribed in their sphere of action. They are 
so far from a capacity of being packed up 
and sent beyond sea, they will scarce endure 
to be transported by hand from this room 
247 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



to the next. Their vigor is as the instant 
of their birth. Their nutriment for their 
brief existence is the intellectual atmo- 
sphere of the bystanders: or this last is the 
fine slime of Nilus— the melior lutus— whose 
maternal recipiency is as necessary as the 
sol pater to their equivocal generation. A 
pun hath a hearty kind of present ear-kiss- 
ing smack with it; you can no more trans- 
mit it in its pristine flavor than you can 
send a kiss.— Have you not tried in some 
instances to palm off a yesterday's pun upon 
a gentleman, and has it answered? Not 
but it was new to his hearing, but it did 
not seem to come new from you. It did not 
hitch in. It was like picking up at a village 
ale-house a two-days-old newspaper. You 
have not seen it before, but you resent the 
stale thing as an affront. This sort of mer- 
chandise above all requires a quick return. 
A pun, and its recognitory laugh, must be 
co-instantaneous. The one is the brisk 
lightning, the other the fierce thunder. A 
moment's interval, and the link is snapped. 
A pun is reflected from a friend's face as 
from a mirror. Who would consult his 
sweet visnomy, if the polished surface were 
two or three minutes (not to speak of twelve 
months, my dear P.) in giving back its copy? 
I cannot image to myself whereabout you 
248 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS 

are. When I try to fix it, Peter Wilkins's 
island comes across me. Sometimes you 
seem to be in the Hades of Thieves. I see 
Diogenes prying among you with his per- 
petual fruitless lantern. What must you 
be willing by this time to give for the sight 
of an honest man! You must almost have 
forgotten how we look. And tell me what 
your Sydneyites do? are they th**v*ng all 
day long? Merciful Heaven! what prop- 
erty can stand against such a depredation ! 
The kangaroos— your Aborigines— do they 
keep their primitive simplicity un-Europe- 
tainted, with those little short fore puds, 
looking like a lesson framed by nature to 
the pickpocket! Marry, for diving into 
fobs they are rather lamely provided a 
priori; but if the hue and cry were once 
up, they would show as fair a pair of hind- 
shifters as the expertest locomotor in the 
colony. We hear the most improbable 
tales at this distance. Pray is it true that 
the young Spartans among you are born 
with six fingers, which spoils their scan- 
ning?— It must look very odd; but use rec- 
onciles. For their scansion, it is less to be 
regretted; for if they take it into their 
heads to be poets, it is odds but they turn 
out, the greater part of them, vile plagia- 
rists.— Is there much difference to see, too, 
249 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



between the son of a th**f and the grand- 
son? or where does the taint stop? Do you 
bleach in three or in four generations? I 
have many questions to put, but ten Delphic 
voyages can be made in a shorter time than 
it will take to satisfy my scruples.— Do you 
grow your own hemp?— What is your staple 
trade,— exclusive of the national profession, 
I mean? Your locksmiths, I take it, are 
some of your great capitalists. 

I am insensibly chatting to you as fa- 
miliarly as when we used to exchange 
good morrows out of our old contiguous 
windows, in pump-famed Hare Court in 
the Temple. Why did you ever leave that 
quiet corner?— Why did I?— with its com- 
plement of four poor elms, from whose 
smoke-dyed barks, the theme of jesting 
ruralists, I picked my first ladybirds! My 
heart is as dry as that spring sometimes 
proves in a thirsty August, when I revert 
to the space that is between us; a length of 
passage enough to render obsolete the 
phrases of our English letters before they 
can reach you. But while I talk I think 
you hear me,— thoughts dallying with vain 
surmise— 

Aye me ! while thee the seas and sounding shores 
Hold far away. 

250 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS 

Come back, before I am grown into a very 
old man, so as you shall hardly know me. 
Come, before Bridget walks on crutches. 
Girls whom you left children have become 
sage matrons while you are tarrying there. 

The blooming Miss W r (you remember 

Sally W r) called upon us yesterday, an 

aged crone. Folks whom you knew die off 
every year. Formerly, I thought that death 
was wearing out,— I stood ramparted about 
with so many healthy friends. The depar- 
ture of J. W., two springs back, corrected 
my delusion. Since then the old divorcer 
has been busy. If you do not make haste 
to return, there will be little left to greet 
you, of me, or mine. 



251 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 



I LIKE to meet a sweep— understand me 
—not a grown sweeper— old chimney- 
sweepers are by no means attractive— 
but one of those tender novices, blooming 
through their first nigritude, the maternal 
washings not quite effaced from the cheek 
—such as come forth with the dawn, or 
somewhat earlier, with their little profes- 
sional notes sounding like the peep-peep of 
a young sparrow; or liker to the matin lark 
should I pronounce them, in their aerial 
ascents not seldom anticipating the sun- 
rise? 

I have a kindly yearning towards these 
dim specks— poor blots— innocent black- 
nesses— 

I reverence these young Africans of our 
own growth— these almost clergy imps, who 
sport their cloth without assumption; and 
from their little pulpits (the tops of chim- 
neys), in the nipping air of a December 
morning, preach a lesson of patience to 
mankind. 

When a child, what a mysterious pleasure 
252 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 

it was to witness their operation! to see a 
chit no bigger than one's self, enter, one 
knew not by what process, into what seemed 
the/awces A verm— to pursue him in imagi- 
nation, as he went sounding on through so 
many dark stifling caverns, horrid shades! 
— to shudder with the idea that "now, 
surely he must be lost forever!"— to revive 
at hearing his feeble shout of discovered 
daylight— and then (0 fullness of delight!) 
running out of doors, to come just in time 
to see the sable phenomenon emerge in 
safety, the brandished weapon of his art 
victorious like some flag waved over a con- 
quered citadel ! I seem to remember having 
been told, that a bad sweep was once left in 
a stack with his brush, to indicate which 
way the wind blew. It was an awful spec- 
tacle, certainly; not much unlike the old 
stage direction in Macbeth, where the " Ap- 
parition of a child crowned, with a tree in 
his hand, rises." 

Reader, if thou meetest one of these small 
gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to 
give him a penny. It is better to give him 
twopence. If it be starving weather, and 
to the proper troubles of his hard occupa- 
tion, a pair of kibed heels (no unusual ac- 
companiment) be superadded, the demand 
on thy humanity will surely rise to a tester. 
253 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



There is a composition, the groundwork 
of which I have understood to be the sweet 
wood yclept sassafras. This wood boiled 
down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an 
infusion of milk and sugar, hath to some 
tastes a delicacy beyond the China luxury. 
I know not how thy palate may relish it; 
for myself, with every deference to the judi- 
cious Mr. Read, who hath time out of mind 
kept open a shop (the only one he avers in 
London) for the vending of this "whole- 
some and pleasant beverage," on the south 
side of Fleet Street, as thou approachest 
Bridge Street— the only Salopian house— I 
have never yet adventured to dip my own 
particular lip in a basin of his commended 
ingredients— a cautious premonition to the 
olfactories constantly whispering to me, 
that my stomach must infallibly, with all 
due courtesy, decline it. Yet I have seen 
palates, otherwise not uninstructed in die- 
tetical elegancies, sup it up with avidity. 

I know not by what particular conforma- 
tion of the organ it happens, but I have 
always found that this composition is sur- 
prisingly gratifying to the palate of a young 
chimney-sweeper— whether the oily parti- 
cles (sassafras is slightly oleaginous) do 
attenuate and soften the fuliginous con- 
cretions, which are sometimes found (in 
254 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 

dissections) to adhere to the roof of the 
mouth in these unfledged practitioners; or 
whether Nature, sensible that she had 
mingled too much of bitter wood in the lot 
of these raw victims, caused to grow out of 
the earth her sassafras for a sweet lenitive 
—but so it is, that no possible taste or odor 
to the senses of a young chimney-sweeper 
can convey a delicate excitement compara- 
ble to this mixture. Being penniless, they 
will yet hang their black heads over the 
ascending steam, to gratify one sense if 
possible, seemingly no less pleased than 
those domestic animals— cats— when they 
purr over a new-found sprig of valerian. 
There is something more in these sympa- 
thies than philosophy can inculcate. 

Now albeit Mr. Read boasteth, not with- 
out reason, that his is the only Salopian 
house; yet be it known to thee, reader— if 
thou art one who keepest what are called 
good hours, thou art haply ignorant of the 
fact— he hath a race of industrious imita- 
tors, who from stalls, and under open sky, 
dispense the same savory mess to humbler 
customers, at that dead time of the dawn, 
when (as extremes meet) the rake reeling 
home from his midnight cups, and the hard- 
handed artisan leaving his bed to resume 
the premature labors of the day, jostle, not 
255 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



unfrequently to the manifest disconcerting 
of the former, for the honors of the pave- 
ment. It is the time when, in summer, 
between the expired and the not yet re- 
lumined kitchen fires, the kennels of our 
fair metropohs give forth their least satis- 
factory odors. The rake, who wisheth to 
dissipate his o'ernight vapors in more grate- 
ful coffee, curses the ungenial fume, as he 
passeth; but the artisan stops to taste, and 
blesses the fragrant breakfast. 

This is saloop— the precocious herb- 
woman's darling— the delight of the early 
gardener, who transports his smoking cab- 
bages by break of day from Hammersmith 
to Covent Garden's famed piazzas— the de- 
light, and oh! I fear, too often the envy, of 
the unpennied sweep. Him shouldst thou 
haply encounter, with his dim visage pen- 
dent over the grateful steam, regale him 
with a sumptuous basin (it will cost thee 
but three halfpennies) and a slice of delicate 
bread and butter (an added halfpenny)— so 
may thy culinary fires, eased of the o'er- 
charged secretions from thy worse-placed 
hospitalities, curl up a lighter volume to 
the welkin— so may the descending soot 
never taint thy costly well-ingredienced 
soups— nor the odious cry, quick-reaching 
from street to street, of the fired chimney, 
256 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 

invite the rattling engines from ten adjacent 
parishes, to disturb for a casual scintillation 
thy peace and pocket! 

I am by nature extremely susceptible of 
street affronts; the jeers and taunts of the 
populace; the low-bred triumph they dis- 
play over the casual trip or splashed stock- 
ing of a gentleman. Yet can I endure the 
jocularity of a young sweep with something 
more than forgiveness.— In the last winter 
but one, pacing along Cheapside with my 
accustomed precipitation when I walk west- 
ward, a treacherous slide brought me upon 
my back in an instant. I scrambled up 
with pain and shame enough— yet out- 
wardly trying to face it down, as if nothing 
had happened — when the roguish grin of 
one of these young wits encountered me. 
There he stood, pointing me out with his 
dusky finger to the mob, and to a poor 
woman (I suppose his mother) in particular, 
till the tears for the exquisiteness of the 
fun (so he thought it) worked themselves 
out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red 
from many a previous weeping, and soot- 
inflamed, yet twinkling through all with 
such a joy, snatched out of desolation, 
that Hogarth— but Hogarth has got him 
already (how could he miss him?) in the 
March to Finchley, grinning at the pieman 
17 257 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



—there he stood, as he stands in the pic- 
ture, irremovable, as if the jest was to last 
forever— with such a maximum of glee, 
and minimum of mischief, in his mirth— for 
the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely 
no malice in it — that I could have been con- 
tent, if the honor of a gentleman might 
endure it, to have remained his butt and 
his mockery till midnight. 

I am by theory obdurate to the seductive- 
ness of what are called a fine set of teeth. 
Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies must 
pardon me) is a casket presumably holding 
such jewels; but, methinks, they should 
take leave to "air" them as frugally as 
possible. The fine lady, or fine gentleman, 
who show me their teeth, show me bones. 
Yet must I confess, that from the mouth of 
a true sweep a display (even to ostentation) 
of those white and shiny ossifications, 
strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in man- 
ners, and an allowable piece of foppery. It 
is as when 

a sable cloud 
Tvirns forth her silver lining on the night. 

It is like some remnant of gentry not quite 
extinct; a badge of better days; a hint of 
nobility:— and, doubtless, under the obscur- 
ing darkness and double night of their for- 

258 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 

lorn disguisementj oftentimes lurketh good 
blood and gentle conditions, derived from 
lost ancestry and a lapsed pedigree. The 
premature apprenticements of these tender 
victims give but too much encouragement, 
I fear, to clandestine and almost infantile 
abductions; the seeds of civility and true 
courtesy, so often discernible in these 
young grafts (not otherwise to be accounted 
for), plainly hint at some forced adoptions; 
many noble Rachels mourning for their 
children, even in our days, countenance the 
fact; the tales of fairy spiriting may shadow 
a lamentable verity, and the recovery of the 
young Montagu be but a solitary instance 
of good fortune out of many irreparable 
and hopeless defiliations. 

In one of the state beds at Arundel 
Castle, a few years since— under a ducal 
canopy— (that seat of the Howards is an 
object of curiosity to visitors, chieily for its 
beds, in which the late duke was especially 
a connoisseur)— encircled with curtains of 
delicatest crimson, with starry coronets 
inwoven— folded between a pair of sheets 
whiter and softer than the lap where 
Venus lulled Ascanius— was discovered by 
chance, after all methods of search had 
failed, at noonday, fast asleep, a lost chim- 
ney-sweeper. The little creature, having 
259 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



somehow confounded his passage among 
the intricacies of those lordly chimneys, by 
some unknown aperture had alighted upon 
this magnificent chamber; and, tired with 
his tedious explorations, was unable to re- 
sist the delicious invitement to repose, 
which he there saw exhibited; so creeping 
between the sheets very quietly, laid his 
black head upon the pillow, and slept like 
a young Howard. 

Such is the account given to the visitors 
at the Castle.— But I cannot help seeming 
to perceive a confirmation of what I had 
just hinted at in this story. A high in- 
stinct was at work in the case, or I am 
mistaken. Is it probable that a poor child 
of that description, with whatever weari- 
ness he might be visited, would have ven- 
tured, under such a penalty as he would be 
taught to expect, to uncover the sheets of 
a Duke's bed, and deliberately to lay him- 
self down between them, when the rug, or 
the carpet, presented an obvious couch, 
still far above his pretensions— is this 
probable, I would ask, if the great power of 
nature, which I contend for, had not been 
manifested within him, prompting to the 
adventure? Doubtless this young noble- 
man (for such my mind misgives me that 
he must be) was allured by some memory, 
260 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 

not amounting to full consciousness, of his 
condition in infancy, when he was used to 
be lapped by his mother, or his nurse, in 
just such sheets as he there found, into 
which he was now but creeping back as 
into his proper incunabula and resting- 
place.— By no other theory than by this 
sentiment of a preexistent state (as I may 
call it), can I explain a deed so venturous, 
and, indeed, upon any other system, so in- 
decorous, in this tender, but unseasonable, 
sleeper. 

My pleasant friend Jem White was so 
impressed with a belief of metamorphoses 
like this frequently taking place, that in 
some sort to reverse the wrongs of fortune 
in these poor changelings, he instituted an 
annual feast of chimney-sweepers, at which 
it was his pleasure to officiate as host and 
waiter. It was a solemn supper held in 
Smithfield, upon the yearly return of the 
fair of St. Bartholomew. Cards were issued 
a week before to the master-sweeps in and 
about the metropolis, confining the invita- 
tion to their younger fry. Now and then 
an elderly stripling would get in among us, 
and be good-naturedly winked at; but our 
main body were infantry. One unfortunate 
wight, indeed, who, relying upon his dusky 
suit, had intruded himself into our party, 
261 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



but by tokens was providentially discovered 
in time to be no chimney-sweeper (ail is 
not soot which looks so), was quoited out 
of the presence with universal indignation, 
as not having on the wedding garment; but 
in general the greatest harmony prevailed. 
The place chosen was a convenient spot 
among the pens, at the north side of the 
fair, not so far distant as to be impervious 
to the agreeable hubbub of that vanity, but 
remote enough not to be obvious to the in- 
terruption of every gaping spectator in it. 
The guests assembled about seven. In 
those little temporary parlors three tables 
were spread with napery, not so fine as sub- 
stantial, and at every board a comely hos- 
tess presided with her pan of hissing sau- 
sages. The nostrils of the young rogues 
dilated at the savor. James White, as head 
waiter, had charge of the first table; and 
myself, with our trusty companion Bigod, 
ordinarily ministered to the other two. 
There was clambering and jostling, you 
may be sure, who should get at the first 
table— for Rochester in his maddest days 
could not have done the humors of the 
scene with more spirit than my friend. 
After some general expression of thanks 
for the honor the company had done him, 
his inaugural ceremony was to clasp the 
262 



THE PRAISE OP CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 

greasy waist of old dame Ursula (the fat- 
test of the three), that stood frying and 
fretting, half blessing, half cursing "the 
gentleman," and imprint upon her chaste 
lips a tender salute, whereat the universal 
host would set up a shout that tore the 
concave, while hundreds of grinning teeth 
startled the night with their brightness. 
it was a pleasure to see the sable youn- 
kers lick in the unctuous meat, with his 
more unctuous sayings— how he would fit 
the titbits to the puny mouths, reserving 
the lengthier links for the seniors— how he 
would intercept a morsel even in the jaws 
of some young desperado, declaring it 
"must to the pan again to be browned, for 
it was not fit for a gentleman's eating"— 
how he would recommend this slice of 
white bread, or that piece of kissing-crust, 
to a tender juvenile, advising them all to 
have a care of cracking their teeth, which 
were their best patrimony,— how genteelly 
he would deal about the small ale, as if it 
were wine, naming the brewer, and protest- 
ing, if it were not good, he should lose their 
custom; with a special recommendation to 
wipe the lip before drinking. Then we had 
our toasts-" the King,"— "the Cloth,"- 
which, whether they understood or not, was 
equally diverting and flattering;— and for a 
263 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



crowning sentiment, which never failed, 
"May the Brush supersede the Laurel!" 
All these, and fifty other fancies, which 
were rather felt than comprehended by his 
guests, would he utter, standing upon 
tables, and prefacing every sentiment with 
a " Gentlemen, give me leave to propose so- 
and-so," which was a prodigious comfort to 
those young orphans; every now and then 
stuffing into his mouth (for it did not do to 
be squeamish on these occasions) indis- 
criminate pieces of those reeking sausages, 
which pleased them mightily, and was the 
savoriest part, you may believe, of the en- 
tertainment. 

Golden lads and lasses must, 
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust- 
James White is extinct, and with him 
these suppers have long ceased. He carried 
away with him half the fun of the world 
when he died— of my world at least. His 
old clients look for him among the pens; 
and, missing him, reproach the altered feast 
of St. Bartholomew, and the glory of Smith- 
field departed forever. 



264 



A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF 
BEGGARS, 

IN THE METROPOLIS 



THE all-sweeping besom of socletarian 
reformation— your only modern Al- 
cides' club to rid the time of its 
abuses— is uplift with many-handed sway 
to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of 
the bugbear Mendicity from the metropo- 
lis. Scrips, wallets, bags— staves, dogs, 
and crutches— the whole mendicant fra- 
ternity, with all their baggage, are fast 
posting out of the purlieus of this eleventh 
persecution. From the crowded crossing, 
from the corners of streets and turnings of 
alleys, the parting Genius of Beggary is 
"with sighing sent." 

I do not approve of this wholesale going 
to work, this impertinent crusado, or bel- 
lum ad exterminationem, proclaimed against 
a species. Much good might be sucked 
from these Beggars. 

They were the oldest and the honorablest 

form of pauperism. Their appeals were to 

our common nature; less revolting to an 

ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to 

265 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



the particular humors or caprice of any fel- 
low-creature, or set of fellow-creatures, 
parochial or societarian. Theirs were the 
only rates uninvidious in the levy, un- 
grudged in the assessment. 

There was a dignity springing from the 
very depth of their desolation; as to be 
naked is to he so much nearer to the being 
a man, than to go in livery. 

The greatest spirits have felt this in 
their reverses; and when Dionysius from 
king turned schoolmaster, do we feel 
anything towards him but contempt? 
Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, 
swaying a ferula for a scepter, which would 
have affected our minds with the same he- 
roic pity, the same compassionate admira- 
tion, with which we regard his Belisarius 
begging for an obolus ? Would the moral 
have been more graceful, more pathetic? 

The Blind Beggar in the legend— the 
father of pretty Bessy— whose story dog- 
gerel rhymes and ale-house signs cannot so 
degrade or attenuate but that some sparks 
of a lustrous spirit will shine through the 
disguisements— this noble Earl of Cornwall 
(as indeed he was) and memorable sport of 
fortune, fleeing from the unjust sentence 
of his liege lord, stript of all, and seated on 
the flowering green of Bethnal, with his 
266 



THE DECAY OF BEGGARS 

more fresh and springing daughter by his 
side, illumining his rags and his beggary- 
would the child and parent have cut a bet- 
ter figure doing the honors of a counter, or 
expiating their fallen condition upon the 
three-foot eminence of some sempstering 
shop-board? 

In tale or history your Beggar is ever the 
just antipode to your King. The poets and 
romancical writers (as dear Margaret New- 
castle would call them), when they would 
most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse 
of fortune, never stop till they have brought 
down their hero in good earnest to rags 
and the wallet. The depth of the descent 
illustrates the height he falls from. There 
is no medium which can be presented to 
the imagination without offense. There is 
no breaking the fall. Lear, thrown from 
his palace, must divest him of his gar- 
ments, till he answer " mere nature "; 
and Cresseid, fallen from a prince's love, 
must extend her pale arms, pale with 
other whiteness than of beauty, sup- 
plicating lazar alms with bell and clap- 
dish. 

The Lucian wits knew this very well; 

and, with a converse policy, when they 

would express scorn of greatness without 

the pity, they show us an Alexander in the 

267 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



shades cobbling shoes, or a Semiramis get- 
ting up foul linen. 

How would it sound in song, that a great 
monarch had declined his affections upon 
the daughter of a baker! yet do we feel the 
imagination at all violated when we read 
the "true ballad," where King Cophetua 
wooes the beggar maid? 

Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are ex- 
pressions of pity, but pity alloyed with con- 
tempt. No one properly contemns a Beg- 
gar. Poverty is a comparative thing, and 
each degree of it is mocked by its " neigh- 
bor grice." Its poor rents and comings-in 
are soon summed up and told. Its pre- 
tenses to property are almost ludicrous. 
Its pitiful attempts to save excite a smile. 
Every scornful companion can weigh his 
trifle-bigger purse against it. Poor man 
reproaches poor man in the streets with 
impolitic mention of his condition, his own 
being a shade better, while the rich pass by 
and jeer at both. No rascally comparative 
insults a Beggar, or thinks of weighing 
purses with him. He is not in the scale of 
comparison. He is not under the measure 
of property. He confessedly hath none, 
any more than a dog or a sheep. No one 
twitteth him with ostentation above his 
means. No one accuses him of pride, or 
268 



THE DECAY OF BEGGARS 

upbraideth him with mock humihty. None 
Jostle with him for the wall, or pick quar- 
rels for precedency. No wealthy neighbor 
seeketh to eject him from his tenement. 
No man sues him. No man goes to law 
with him. If I were not the independent 
gentleman that I am, rather than I would 
be a retainer to the great, a led captain, or 
a poor relation, I would choose, out of the 
delicacy and true greatness of my mind, to 
be a Beggar. 

Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, 
are the Beggar's robes, and graceful insig- 
nia of his profession, his tenure, his full 
dress, the suit in which he is expected to 
show himself in public. He is never out of 
the fashion, or limpeth awkwardly behind 
it. He is not required to put on court 
mourning. He weareth all colors, fearing 
none. His costume hath undergone less 
change than the Quaker's. He is the only 
man in the universe who is not obliged to 
study appearances. The ups and downs of 
the world concern him no longer. He alone 
continueth in one stay. The price of stock 
or land affecteth him not. The fluctua- 
tions of agricultural or commercial pros- 
perity touch him not, or at worst but 
change his customers. He is not expected 
to become bail or surety for any one. No 
269 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



man troubleth him with questioning his 
religion or poHtics. He is the only free 
man in the universe. 

The Mendicants of this great city were 
so many of her sights, her lions. I can no 
more spare them than I could the Cries of 
London. No corner of a street is complete 
without them. They are as indispensable 
as the Ballad Singer; and in their pictur- 
esque attire as ornamental as the signs 
of old London. They were the standing 
morals, emblems, mementos, dial-mot- 
tos, the spital sermons, the books for 
children, the salutary checks and pauses to 
the high and rushing tide of greasy citi- 
zenry — 

—Look 

Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there. 

Above all, those old blind Tobits that 
used to line the wall of Lincoln's Inn Gar- 
den, before modern fastidiousness had ex- 
pelled them, casting up their ruined orbs 
to catch a ray of pity, and (if possible) of 
light, with their faithful Dog Guide at 
their feet,— whither are they fled? or into 
what corners, blind as themselves, have 
they been driven, out of the wholesome air 
and sun-warmth? immersed between four 
walls, in what withering poorhouse do 
270 



THE DECAY OF BEGGARS 

they endure the penalty of double dark- 
ness, where the chink of the dropt half- 
penny no more consoles their forlorn be- 
reavement, far from the sound of the 
cheerful and hope-stirring tread of the 
passenger? Where hang their useless 
staves? and who will farm their dogs?— 

Have the overseers of St. L caused 

them to be shot? or were they tied up in 
sacks and dropt into the Thames, at the 

suggestion of B the mild rector of ? 

Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vin- 
cent Bourne, most classical, and, at the 
same time, most English of the Latinists! 
—who has treated of this human and quad- 
rupedal alliance, this dog and man friend- 
ship, in the sweetest of his poems, the 
Epitaphium in Canera, or Dog's Epitaph. 
Reader, peruse it; and say, if customary 
sights, which could call up such gentle 
poetry as this, were of a nature to do more 
harm or good to the moral sense of the 
passengers through the daily thorough- 
fares of a vast and busy metropolis. 

Pauperis hie Iri requiesco Lyciseus, lierilis, 
Dunx vixi, tutela vigil columenque senectse, 
Dux eseco fidus : nee, me dueente, solebat, 
Prsetenso hinc atque hinc baculo, per iniqua 

locorum 
Incertam explorare viam ; sed fila secutus, 
Quae dubios regerent passiis, vestigia tuta 

271 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



Fixit inofifenso gressu ; gelidumque sedile 
In nudo nactus saxo, qua prsetereuntium 
Unda frequens confluxit, ibi miserisque tenebras 
Lamentis, noctemque oculis ploravit obortam. 
Ploravit nee frustra ; obolum dedit alter et alter, 
Quels corda et mentem indiderat natura benig- 

nam. 
Ad latus interea jacui sopitus herile, 
Vel mediis vigil in somnis ; ad herilia jussa 
Auresque atque animum arrectus, sen frustula 

amicfe 
Porrexit sociasque dapes, sen longa diei 
Tsedia perpessus, reditum sub nocte parabat. 
Hi mores, hsec vita fuit, dum fata sinebant, 
Dum neque languebam morbis, nee inerte se- 

necta 
Quae tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite csecum 
Orbavit dominum ; prisci sed gratia facti 
Ne tota intereat, longos deleta per annos, 
Exiguum hunc Irus tumulum de cespite fecit, 
Etsi inopis, non ingratse, munuscula dextrse ; 
Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque ca- 

nemque, 
Quod memoret, fidumque canem dominumque 

benignum. 

Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie, 

That wont to tend my old blind master's steps. 

His guide and guard; nor, while my service 

lasted. 
Had he occasion for that staff, with which 
He now goes picking out his path in fear 
Over the highways and crossings; but would 

plant. 
Safe in the conduct of my friendly string, 
A firm foot forward still, till he had reach' d 

272 



THE DECAY OP BEGGARS 

His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide 
Of passers-by in thickest confluence flow'd : 
To whom with loud and passionate laments 
From morn to eve his dark estate he wail'd. 
Nor wail'd to all in vain : some here and there, 
The well-disposed and good, their pennies gave. 
I meantime at his feet obsequious slept ; 
Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and ear 
Prick' d up at his least motion ; to receive 
At his kind hand my customary crumbs, 
And common portion in his feast of scraps ; 
Or when night warn'd us homeward, tired and 

spent 
With our long day and tedious beggary. 

These were my raanners, this my way of life 
Till age and slow disease me overtook, 
And sever' d from my sightless master's side. 
But lest the grace of so good deeds should die. 
Through tract of years in mute oblivion lost^ 
This slender tomb of turf hath Irus reared. 
Cheap monument of no ungrudging hand. 
And with short verse inscribed it, to attest. 
In long and lasting union to attest, 
The virtues of the Beggar and his Dog. 

These dim eyes have in vain explored for 
some months past a well-known figure, or 
part of the figure, of a man, who used to 
glide his comely upper half over the pave- 
ments of London, wheeling along with most 
ingenious celerity upon a machine of wood; 
a spectacle to natives, to foreigners, and to 
children. He was of a robust make, with a 
florid sailor-like complexion, and his head 
was bare to the storm and sunshine. He 
IS 273 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



was a natural curiosity, a speculation to the 
scientific, a prodigy to the simple. The 
infant would stare at the mighty man 
brought down to his own level. The com- 
mon cripple would despise his own pusil- 
lanimity, viewing the hale stoutness, and 
hearty heart, of this half-limbed giant. 
Few but must have noticed him; for the 
accident which brought him low took place 
during the riots of 1780, and he has been a 
groundling so long. He seemed earth-born, 
an Antaeus, and to suck in fresh vigor from 
the soil which he neighbored. He was a 
grand fragment; as good as an Elgin mar- 
ble. The nature, which should have re- 
cruited his reft legs and thighs, was not 
lost, but only retired into his upper parts, 
and he was half a Hercules. I heard a 
tremendous voice thundering and growling, 
as before an earthquake, and casting down 
my eyes, it was this mandrake reviling a 
steed that had started at his portentous 
appearance. He seemed to want but his 
just stature to have rent the offending 
quadruped in shivers. He was as the man- 
part of a centaur, from which the horse- 
half had been cloven in some dire Lapithan 
controversy. He moved on, as if he could 
have made shift with yet half of the body- 
portion which was left him. The os sub- 
274 



THE DECAY OF BEGGARS 

lime was not wanting; and he threw out 
yet a jolly countenance upon the heavens. 
Forty-and-two years had he driven this 
out-of-door trade, and now that his hair is 
grizzled in the service, but his good spirits 
no way impaired, because he is not content 
to exchange his free air and exercise for the 
restraints of a poorhouse, he is expiating 
his contumacy in one of those houses 
(ironically christened) of Correction. 

Was a daily spectacle like this to be 
deemed a nuisance, which called for legal 
interference to remove? or not rather a 
salutary and a touching object to the pass- 
ers-by in a great city? Among her shows, 
her museums, and supplies for ever-gaping 
curiosity (and what else but an accumula- 
tion of sights— endless sights— is a great 
city; or for what else is it desirable?) was 
there not room for one Lusus (not Naturce, 
indeed, but) Accidentium ? What if, in 
forty-and-two-years' going about, the man 
had scraped together enough to give a por- 
tion to his child (as the rumor ran) of a few 
hundreds— whom had he injured?— whom 
had he imposed upon? The contributors 
had enjoyed their sight for their pennies. 
What if after being exposed all day to the 
heats, the rains, and the frosts of heaven 
—shuffling his ungainly trunk along in an 
275 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



elaborate and painful motion— he was en- 
abled to retire at night to enjoy himself at 
a club of his fellow-cripples over a dish of 
hot meat and vegetables, as the charge was 
gravely brought against him by a clergy- 
man deposing before a House of Commons' 
Committee— was this,orwas his truly pater- 
nal consideration, which (if a fact) deserved 
a statue rather than a whipping-post, and 
is inconsistent, at least, with the exaggera- 
tion of nocturnal orgies which he has been 
slandered with— a reason that he should be 
deprived of his chosen, harmless, nay, 
edifying way of life, and be committed in 
hoary age for a sturdy vagabond?— 

There was a Yorick once, whom it would 
not have shamed to have sate down at the 
cripples' feast, and to have thrown in his 
benediction, aye, and his mite too, for a com- 
panionable symbol. "Age, thou has lost 
thy breed."— 

Half of these stories about the prodigious 
fortunes made by begging are (I verily be- 
lieve) misers' calumnies. One was much 
talked of in the public papers some time 
since, and the usual charitable inferences 
deduced. A clerk in the Bank was surprised 
with the announcement of a five-hundred- 
pound legacy left him by a person whose 
name he was a stranger to. It seems that 
276 



THE DECAY OF BEGGARS 

in his daily morning walks from Peckham 
(or some village thereabouts) where he lived, 
to his office, it had been his practice for the 
last twenty years to drop his halfpenny 
duly into the hat of some blind Bartimeus, 
that sate begging alms by the wayside in 
the Borough. The good old beggar recog- 
nized his daily benefactor by the voice 
only; and, when he died, left all the amass- 
ings of his alms (that had been half a cen- 
tury perhaps in the accumulating) to his 
old Bank friend. Was this a story to purse 
up people's hearts, and pennies, 'against 
giving an alms to the blind?— or not rather 
a beautiful moral of well-directed charity 
on the one part, and noble gratitude upon 
the other? 

I sometimes wish I had been that Bank 
clerk. 

I seem to remember a poor old grateful 
kind of creature, blinking and looking up 
with his no eyes in the sun— 

Is it possible I could have steeled my 
purse against him? 

Perhaps I had no small change. 

Reader, do not be frightened at the hard 
words imposition, imposture— ^rive, and ask 
no questions. Cast thy bread upon the 
waters. Some have unawares (like this 
Bank clerk) entertained angels. 
277 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



Shut not thy purse-strings always against 
painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. 
When a poor creature (outwardly and visi- 
bly such) comes before thee, do not stay to 
inquire whether the " seven small children," 
in whose name he implores thy assistance, 
have a veritable existence. Rake not into 
the bowels of unwelcome truth to save a 
halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If 
he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and 
under a personate father of a family think 
(if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an 
indigent bachelor. When they come with 
their counterfeit looks and mumping tones, 
think them players. You pay your money 
to see a comedian feign these things, which, 
concerning these poor people, thou canst 
not certainly tell whether they are feigned 
or not. 



278 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 



MANKIND, says a Chinese manu- 
script, which my friend M. was 
obliging enough to read and explain 
to me, for the first seventy thousand ages 
ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it 
from the living animal, just as they do in 
Abyssinia to this day. This period is not 
obscurely hinted at by their great Confu- 
cius in the second chapter of his Mundane 
Mutations, where he designates a kind of 
golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally 
the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes 
on to say, that the art of roasting, or 
rather broiling (which I take to be the elder 
brother), was accidentally discovered in the 
manner following. The swine-herd, Ho-ti, 
having gone out into the woods one morn- 
ing, as his manner was, to collect mast for 
his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his 
eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who 
being fond of playing with fire, as younkers 
of his age commonly are, let some sparks 
escape into a bundle of straw, which kin- 
dling quickly, spread the conflagration over 
279 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



every part of their poor mansion, till it was 
reduced to ashes. Together with the cot- 
tage (a sorry antediluvian makeshift of a 
building, you may think it), what was of 
much more importance, a fine litter of new- 
farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, 
perished. China pigs have been esteemed 
a luxury all over the East, from the re- 
motest periods that we read of. Bo-bo 
was in the utmost consternation, as you 
may think, not so much for the sake of the 
tenement, which his father and he could 
easily build up again with a few dry 
branches, and the labor of an hour or two, 
at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. 
While he was thinking what he should say 
to his father, and wringing his hands over 
the smoking remnants of one of those 
untimely sufferers, an odor assailed his 
nostrils, unlike any scent which he had be- 
fore experienced. What could it proceed 
from?— not from the burnt cottage— he had 
smelt that smell before— indeed, this was 
by no means the first accident of the kind 
which had occurred through the negligence 
of this unlucky young firebrand. Much 
less did it resemble that of any known herb, 
weed, or flower. A premonitory moisten- 
ing at the same time overflowed his nether 
lip. He knew not what to think. He next 
280 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 

stooped down to feel the pig, if there were 
any signs of hfe in it. He burnt his fingers, 
and to cool them he applied them in his 
booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the 
crumbs of the scorched skin had come away 
with his fingers, and for the first time in 
his life (in the world's life indeed, for before 
him no man had known it) he tasted— 
crackling ! Again he felt and fumbled at 
the pig. It did not burn him so much now, 
still he licked his fingers from a sort of 
habit. The truth at length broke into his 
slow understanding, that it was the pig 
that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so 
delicious; and surrendering himself up to 
the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing 
up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with 
the flesh next it, and was cramming it down 
his throat in his beastly fashion, when his 
sire entered amid the smoking rafters, 
armed with retributory cudgel, and finding 
how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon 
the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as 
hailstones, which Bo-bo heeded not any 
more than if they had been flies. The 
tickling pleasure, which he experienced in 
his lower regions, had rendered him quite 
callous to any inconveniences he might feel 
in those remote quarters. His father 
might lay on, but he could not beat him 
281 



ESSAYS OP ELI A 



from his pig, till he had fairly made an end 
of it, when, becoming a little more sensible 
of his situation, something like the follow- 
ing dialogue ensued. 

"You graceless whelp, what have you 
got there devouring? Is it not enough 
that you have burnt me down three houses 
with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to 
you! but you must be eating fire, and I 
know not what— what have you got there, 
I say?" 

"0 father, the pig, the pig! do come and 
taste how nice the burnt pig eats." 

The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. 
He cursed his son, and he cursed himself 
that ever he should beget a son that should 
eat burnt pig. 

Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully 
sharpened since morning, soon raked out 
another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, 
thrust the lesser half by main force into 
the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, " Eat, 
eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste— 
O Lord!"— with such-like barbarous ejacu- 
lations, cramming all the while as if he 
would choke. 

Ho-ti trembled every joint while he 

grasped the abominable thing, wavering 

whether he should not put his son to death 

for an unnatural young monster, when the 

282 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 

crackling scorching his fingers, as it had 
done his son's, and applying the same 
remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some 
of its flavor, which, make what sour 
mouths he would for a pretense, proved not 
altogether displeasing to him. In conclu- 
sion (for the manuscript here is a little 
tedious), both father and son fairly sat 
down to the mess, and never left off till 
they had despatched all that remained of 
the litter. 

Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the 
secret escape, for the neighbors would cer- 
tainly have stoned them for a couple of 
abominable wretches, who could think of 
improving upon the good meat which God 
had sent them. Nevertheless, strange 
stories got about. It was observed that 
Ho-ti's cottage was burnt down now more 
frequently than ever. Nothing but fires 
from this time forward. Some would break 
out in broad day, others in the night-time. 
As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was 
the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and 
Ho-ti himself, which was the more remark- 
able, instead of chastising his son, seemed 
to grow more indulgent to him than ever. 
At length they were watched, the terrible 
mystery discovered, and father and son 
summoned to take their trial at Pekin, 
283 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



then an inconsiderable assize town. Evi- 
dence was given, the obnoxious food itself 
produced in court, and verdict about to be 
pronounced, when the foreman of the jury 
begged that some of the burnt pig, of 
which the culprits stood accused, might be 
handed into the box. He handled it, and 
they all handled it; and burning their fin- 
gers, as Bo-bo and his father had done be- 
fore them, and nature prompting to each of 
them the same remedy, against the face of 
all the facts, and the clearest charge which 
judge had ever given,— to the surprise of 
the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, re- 
porters, and all present,— without leaving 
the box, or any manner of consultation 
whatever, they brought in a simultaneous 
verdict of Not Guilty. 

The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, 
winked at the manifest iniquity of the de- 
cision; and when the court was dismissed, 
went privily and bought up all the pigs 
that could be had for love or money. In a 
few days his Lordship's town-house was 
observed to be on fire. The thing took 
wing, and now there was nothing to be seen 
but fires in every direction. Fuel and pigs 
grew enormously dear all over the district. 
The insurance-ofiices one and all shut up 
shop. People built slighter and slighter 
284 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 

every day, until it was feared that the very 
science of architecture would in no long 
time be lost to the world. Thus this cus- 
tom of firing houses continued, till in pro- 
cess of time, says my manuscript, a sage 
arose, like our Locke, who made a discov- 
ery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any 
other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as 
they called it) without the necessity of con- 
suming a whole house to dress it. Then 
first began the rude form of a gridiron. 
Roasting by the string or spit came in a 
century or two later, I forget in whose 
dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes 
the manuscript, do the most useful, and 
seemingly the most obvious, arts make 
their way among mankind— 

Without placing too implicit faith in the 
account above given, it must be agreed that 
if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an 
experiment as setting houses on fire (es- 
pecially in these days) could be assigned in 
favor of any culinary object, that pretext 
and excuse might be found in ROAST PIG. 

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus 
edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most 
delicate— prineeps obsoniorum. 

I speak not of your grown porkers— 
things between pig and pork— those hobble- 
dehoys—but a young and tender suckling 
285 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



—under a moon old— guiltless as yet of the 
sty— with no original speck of the amor 
immunditioe, the hereditary failing of the 
first parent, yet manifest— his voice as yet 
not broken, but something between a child- 
ish treble and a grumble— the mild fore- 
runner or prceludium of a grunt. 

He must be roasted. I am not ignorant 
that our ancestors ate them seethed, or 
boiled— but what a sacrifice of the exterior 
tegument. 

There is no flavor comparable, I will con- 
tend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well- 
watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it 
is well called— the very teeth are invited to 
their share of the pleasure at this banquet 
in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance— 
with the adhesive oleaginous— O call it not 
fat! but an indefinable sweetness growing 
up to it— the tender blossoming of fat— fat 
cropped in the bud— taken in the shoot- 
in the first innocence— the cream and quin- 
tessence of the child-pig's yet pure food— 
the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal man- 
na—or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be 
so) so blended and running into each other, 
that both together make but one ambrosian 
result or common substance. 

Behold him while he is doing— it seemeth 
rather a refreshing warmth, than a scorch- 
286 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 

ing heat, that he is so passive to. How 
equably he twirleth round the string!— Now 
he is just done. To see the extreme sensi- 
bihty of that tender age! he hath wept out 
his pretty eyes— radiant jellies— shooting 
stars.— 

See him in the dish, his second cradle, 
how meek he lieth!— wouldst thou have had 
this innocent grow up to the grossness 
and indocility which too often accompany 
maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would 
have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obsti- 
nate, disagreeable animal — wallowing in all 
manner of filthy conversation— from these 
sins he is happily snatched away— 

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, 
Death came with timely care— 

his memory is odoriferous — no clown curs- 
eth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the 
rank bacon— no coal-heaver bolteth him in 
reeking sausages— he hath a fair sepulcher 
in the grateful stomach of the judicious 
epicure— and for such a tomb might be con- 
tent to die. 

He is the best of sapors. Pineapple is 
great. She is indeed almost too transcen- 
dent—a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to 
sinning, that really a tender-conscienced 
person would do well to pause— too ravish- 
287 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



ing for mortal taste, she woundeth and 
excoriateth the lips that approach her— 
like lovers' kisses, she biteth— she is a 
pleasure bordering on pain from the fierce- 
ness and insanity of her relish— but she 
stoppeth at the palate— she meddleth not 
with the appetite— and the coarsest hunger 
might barter her consistently for a mut- 
ton-chop. 

Pig— let me speak his praise— is no less 
provocative of the appetite than he is sat- 
isfactory to the criticalness of the censori- 
ous palate. The strong man may batten 
on him, and the weakling refuseth not his 
mild juices. 

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a 
bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably in- 
tertwisted, and not to be unraveled without 
hazard, he is— good throughout. No part 
of him is better or worse than another. 
He helpeth, as far as his little means ex- 
tend, all around. He is the least envious 
of banquets. He is all neighbors' fare. 

I ain one of those who freely and un- 
grudgingly impart a share of the good 
things of this life which fall to their lot 
(few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. 
I protest I take as great an interest in my 
friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper 
satisfactions, as in mine own. " Presents," 
288 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 

I often say, "endear Absents." Hares, 
pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door 
chickens (those " tame villatic fowl "), ca- 
pons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I 
dispense as freely as I receive them. I love 
to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue 
of my friend. But a stop must be put some- 
where. One would not, like Lear, "give 
everything." I make my stand upon pig. 
Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver 
of all good flavors to extra-domiciliate, or 
send out of the house slightingly (under 
pretext of friendship, or I know not what), 
a blessing so particularly adapted, predes- 
tined, I may say, to my individual palate.— 
It argues an insensibility. 

I remember a touch of conscience in this 
kind at school. My good old aunt, who 
never parted from me at the end of a holi- 
day without stuffing a sweetmeat, or some 
nice thing, into my pocket, had dismissed 
me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, 
fresh from the oven. In my way to school 
(it was over London Bridge) a gray-headed 
old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt, at 
this time of day, that he was a counter- 
feit). I had no pence to console him with, 
and in the vanity of self-denial, and the 
very coxcombry of charity, school-boy like, 
I made him a present of— the whole cake! 
1^ 289 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on 
such occasions, with a sweet soothing of 
self-satisfaction; but, before I had got to 
the end of the bridge, my better feelings 
returned, and I burst into tears, thinking 
how ungrateful I had been to my good 
aunt, to go and give her good gift away to 
a stranger that I had never seen before, and 
who might be a bad man for aught I knew; 
and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt 
would be taking in thinking that I— I my- 
self, and not another— would eat her nice 
cake— and what should I say to her the 
next time I saw her— how naughty I was to 
part with her pretty present! — and the odor 
of that spicy cake came back upon my recol- 
lection, and the pleasure and the curiosity 
I had taken in seeing her make it, and her 
joy when she sent it to the oven, and how 
disappointed she would feel that I had never 
had a bit of it in my mouth at last— and I 
blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giv- 
ing, and out-of -place hypocrisy of goodness; 
and above all I wished never to see the face 
again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, 
old gray impostor. 

Our ancestors were nice in their method 
of sacrificing these tender victims. We 
read of pigs whipt to death with something 
of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete 
custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or 
290 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 

it would be curious to inquire (in a philo- 
sophical light merely) what effect this pro- 
cess might have towards intenerating and 
dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild 
and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It 
looks like refining a violet. Yet we should 
be cautious, while we condemn the inhu- 
manity, how we censure the wisdom of the 
practice. It might impart a gusto.— 

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon 
by the young students, when I was at St. 
Omer's, and maintained with much learn- 
ing and pleasantry on both sides, " Whether, 
supposing that the flavor of a pig who ob- 
tained his death by whipping {per flag ella- 
tionem extremam) superadded a pleasure 
upon the palate of a man more intense than 
any possible suffering we can conceive in 
the animal, is man justified in using that 
method of putting the animal to death?" 
I forget the decision. 

His sauce should be considered. De- 
cidedly, a few bread-crumbs, done up with 
his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. 
But banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, 
the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole 
hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, 
stuff them out with plantations of the rank 
and guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, 
or make them stronger than they are— but 
consider, he is a weakling— a flower. 
291 



A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF THE 
BEHAVIOR OP MARRIED PEOPLE 



AS a single man, I have spent a good 

/\ deal of my time in noting down the 
A. \^ infirmitiesof Married People, to con- 
sole myself for those superior pleasures, 
which they tell me I have lost by remaining 
as I am. 

I cannot say that the quarrels of men 
and their wives ever made any great im- 
pression upon me, or had much tendency 
to strengthen me in those anti-social reso- 
lutions which I took up long ago upon more 
substantial considerations. What oftenest 
offends me at the houses of married per- 
sons where I visit, is an error of quite a 
different description;— it is that they are 
too loving. 

Not too loving neither: that does not ex- 
plain my meaning. Besides, why should 
that offend me ? The very act of separating 
themselves from the rest of the world, to 
have the fuller enjoyment of each other's 
society, implies that they prefer one another 
to all the world. 

292 



A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT 

But ."'■hat I complain of is, that they carry 
this preirorence so undisguisedly, they perk 
it up in thQ faces of us single people so 
shamelessly, yon cannot be in their com- 
pany a moment without being made to feel, 
by some indirect hint or open avowal, that 
you are not the object of this preference. 
Now there are some things which give no 
offense, while implied or taken for granted 
merely; but expressed, there is much offense 
in them. If a man were to accost the first 
homely featured or plain-dressed young 
woman of his acquaintance, and tell her 
bluntly, that she was not handsome or rich 
enough for him, and he could not marry her, 
he would deserve to be kicked for his ill 
manners; yet no less is implied in the fact, 
that having access and opportunity of put- 
ting the question to her, he has never yet 
thought fit to do it. The young woman 
understands this as clearly as if it were put 
into words; but no reasonable young woman 
would think of making this the ground of 
a quarrel. Just as little right have a mar- 
ried couple to tell me by speeches, and looks 
that are scarce less plain than speeches, 
that I am not the happy man,— the lady's 
choice. It is enough that I know I am not: 
I do not want this perpetual reminding. 

The display of superior knowledge or 
293 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



riches may be made sufficiently moi'tifying, 
but these admit of a palhative. Tae know- 
ledge which is brought out to insult me, may 
accidentally improve nie; and in the rich 
man's houses and pictureSj— his parks and 
gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at 
least. But the display of married happi- 
ness has none of these palliatives: it is 
throughout pure, unrecompensed, unquali- 
fied insult. 

Marriage .'.y its best title is a monopoly, 
and not of the least invidious sort. It is 
the cunning of most possessors of any ex- 
clusive privilege to keep their advantage as 
much out of sight as possible, that their 
less favored neighbors, seeing little of the 
benefit, may the less be disposed to ques- 
tion the right. But these married monop- 
olists thrust the most obnoxious part of 
their patent into our faces. 

Nothing is to me more distasteful than 
that entire complacency and satisfaction 
which beam in the countenances of a new- 
married couple,— in that of the lady particu- 
larly: it tells you, that her lot is disposed of 
in this world: that you can have no hopes 
of her. It is true, I have none: nor wishes 
either, perhaps: but this is one of those 
truths which ought, as I said before, to be 
taken for granted, not expressed. 
294 



A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT 

The excessive airs which those people 
give themselves, founded on the ignorance 
of us unmarried people, would be more 
offensive if they were less irrational. We 
will allow them to understand the mysteries 
belonging to their own craft better than 
we, who have not had the happiness to be 
made free of the company: but their arro- 
gance is not content within these limits. 
If a single person presume to offer his opin- 
ion in their presence, though upon the most 
indifferent subject, he is immediately 
silenced as an incompetent person. Nay, 
a young married lady of my acquaintance, 
who, the best of the jest was, had not 
changed her condition above a fortnight 
before, in a question on which I had the 
misfortune to differ from her, respecting 
the properest mode of breeding oysters for 
the London market, had the assurance to 
ask with a sneer, how such an old Bachelor 
as I could pretend to know anything about 
such matters! 

But what I have spoken of hitherto is 
nothing to the airs which these creatures 
give themselves when they come, as they 
generally do, to have children. When I 
consider how little of a rarity children are, 
—that every street and blind alley swarms 
with them, —that the poorest people com- 
295 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



monly have them in most abundance,— that 
there are few marriages that are not blest 
with at least one of these bargains,— how 
often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond 
hopes of their parents, taking to vicious 
courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, 
the gallows, etc.— I cannot for my life tell 
what cause for pride there can possibly be 
in having them. If they were young phe- 
nixes, indeed, that were born but one in a 
year, there might be a pretext. But when 
they are so common— 

I do not advert to the insolent merit 
which they assume with their husbands on 
these occasions. Let them look to that. 
But why we, who are not their natural-born 
subjects, should be expected to bring our 
spices, myrrh, and incense,— our tribute and 
homage of admiration,— I do not see. 

"Like as the arrows in the hand of the 
giant, even so are the young children"; 
so says the excellent office in our Prayer- 
book appointed for the churching of women. 
" Happy is the man that hath his quiver full 
of them." So say I; but then don't let him 
discharge his quiver upon us that are wea- 
ponless;— let them be arrows, but not to 
gall and stick us. I have generally observed 
that these arrows are double-headed: they 
have two forks, to be sure to hit with one 
296 



A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT 

or the other. As for instance, where you 
come into a house which is full of children, 
if you happen to take no notice of them (you 
are thinking of something else, perhaps, 
and turn a deaf ear to their innocent ca- 
resses), you are set down as untractable, 
morose, a hater of children. On the other 
hand, if you find them more than usually 
engaging,— if you are taken with their 
pretty manners, and set about in earnest 
to romp and play with them, some pretext 
or other is sure to he found for sending 
them out of the room; they are too noisy 

or boisterous, or Mr. does not like 

children. With one or other of these forks 
the arrow is sure to hit you. 

I could forgive their jealousy, and dis- 
pense with toying with their brats, if it 
gives them any pain; but I think it un- 
reasonable to be called upon to love them, 
where I see no occasion,— to love a whole 
family, perhaps eight, nine, or ten, indis- 
criminately,— to love all the pretty dears, 
because children are so engaging! 

I know there is a proverb, " Love me, love 
my dog": that is not always so very prac- 
ticable, particularly if the dog be set upon 
you to tease you or snap at you in sport. 
But a dog, or a lesser thing— any inanimate 
substance, as a keepsake, a watch or a ring, 
297 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



a tree, or the place where we last parted 
when my friend went away upon a long 
absence, I can make shift to love, because 
I love him, and anything that reminds me 
of him; provided it be in its nature indif- 
ferent, and apt to receive whatever hue 
fancy can give it. But children have a real 
character, and an essential being of them- 
selves: they are amiable or unamiableper 
se ; I must love or hate them as I see cause 
for either in their qualities. A child's na- 
ture is too serious a thing to admit of its 
being regarded as a mere appendage to an- 
other being, and to be loved or hated ac- 
cordingly; they stand with me upon their 
own stock, as much as men and women do. 
Oh! but you will say, sure it is an attrac- 
tive age,— there is something in the tender 
years of infancy that of itself charms us? 
That is the very reason why I am more nice 
about them. I know that a sweet child is 
the sweetest thing in nature, not even ex- 
cepting the delicate creatures which bear 
them; but the prettier the kind of a thing 
is, the more desirable it is that it should be 
pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not 
much from another in glory; but a violet 
should look and smell the daintiest.— I was 
always rather squeamish in my women and 
children. 

298 



A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT 

But this is not the worst: one must be 
admitted into their familiarity at least, be- 
fore they can complain of inattention. It 
implies visits, and some kind of intercourse. 
But if the husband be a man with whom 
you have lived on a friendly footing before 
marriage— if you did not come in on the 
wife's side— if you did not sneak into the 
house in her train, but were an old friend 
in fast habits of intimacy before their 
courtship was so much as thought on,— look 
about you— your tenure is precarious— be- 
fore a twelvemonth shall roll over your 
head, you shall find your old friend gradu- 
ally grow cool and altered towards you, and 
at last seek opportunities of breaking with 
you. I have scarce a married friend of my 
acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I can 
rely, whose friendship did not commence 
after the period of his marriage. With 
some limitations, they can endure that; but 
that the good man should have dared to 
enter into a solemn league of friendship in 
which they were not consulted, though it 
happened before they knew him,— before 
they that are now man and wife ever met, 
—this is intolerable to them. Every long 
friendship, every old authentic intimacy, 
must be brought into their office to be new 
stamped with their currency, as a sover- 
299 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



eign prince calls in the good old money 
that was coined in some reign before he 
was born or thought of, to be new marked 
and minted with the stamp of his authority, 
before he will let it pass current in the 
world. You may guess what luck gener- 
ally befalls such a rusty piece of metal 
as I am in these new mintings. 

Innumerable are the ways which they 
take to insult and worm you out of their 
husband's confidence. Laughing at all you 
say with a kind of wonder, as if you were a 
queer kind of fellow that said good things, 
but an oddity, is one of the ways;— they have 
a particular kind of stare for the purpose; 
—till at last the husband, who used to defer 
to your judgment, and would pass over some 
excrescences of understanding and manner 
for the sake of a general vein of observa- 
tion (not quite vulgar) which he perceived 
in you, begins to suspect whether you are 
not altogether a humorist,— a fellow well 
enough to have consorted with in his bache- 
lor days, but not quite so proper to be intro- 
duced to ladies. This may be called the 
staring way; and is that which has oftenest 
been put in practice against me. 

Then there is the exaggerating way, or 
the way of irony; that is, where they find 
you an object of especial regard with their 
300 



A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT 

husband, who is not so easily to be shaken 
from the lasting attachment founded on 
esteem which he has conceived towards 
you, by never qualified exaggerations to cry 
up all that you say or do, till the good man, 
who understands well enough that it is all 
done in compliment to him, grows weary of 
the debt of gratitude which is due to so 
much candor, and by relaxing a little on his 
part, and taking down a peg or two in his 
enthusiasm, sinks at length to the kindly 
level of moderate esteem— that "decent 
affection and complacent kindness" to- 
wards you, where she herself can join in 
sympathy with him without much stretch 
and violence to her sincerity. 

Another way (for the ways they have 
to accomplish so desirable a purpose are 
infinite) is, with a kind of innocent sim- 
plicity, continually to mistake what it was 
which first made their husband fond of you. 
If an esteem for something excellent in 
your moral character was that which riveted 
the chain which she is to break, upon any 
imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy 
in your conversation, she will cry, "I 
thought, my dear, you described your 

friend, Mr. , as a great wit?" If, on 

the other hand, it was for some supposed 

charm in your conversation that he first 

301 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



grew to like you, and was content for this 
to overlook some trifling irregularities in 
your moral deportment, upon the first no- 
tice of any of these she as readily exclaims, 

"This, my dear, is your good Mr. !" 

One good lady whom I took the liberty of 
expostulating with for not showing me 
quite so much respect as I thought due 
to her husband's old friend, had the candor 
to confess to me that she had often heard 

Mr. speak of me before marriage, and 

that she had conceived a great desire to be 
acquainted with me, but that the sight of 
me had very much disappointed her expec- 
tations; for, from her husband's represen- 
tations of me, she had formed a notion that 
she was to see a fine, tall, officer-like look- 
ing man (I use her very words), the very 
reverse of which proved to be the truth. 
This was candid; and I had the civility not 
to ask her in return, how she came to pitch 
upon a standard of personal accomplish- 
ments for her husband's friends which 
differed so much from his own; for my 
friend's dimensions as near as possible ap- 
proximate to mine; he standing five feet five 
in his shoes, in which I have the advantage 
of him by about half an inch; and he no more 
than myself exhibiting any indications of a 
martial character in his air or countenance. 
302 



A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT 

These are some of the mortifications 
which I have encountered in the absurd 
attempt to visit at their houses. To enu- 
merate them all would be a vain endeavor; 
I shall therefore just glance at the very- 
common impropriety of which married 
ladies are guilty,— of treating us as if we 
were their husbands, and vice versa. I 
mean, when they use us with familiarity, 
and their husbands with ceremony. Tes- 
tacea, for instance, kept me the other night 
two or three hours beyond my usual time 
of supping, while she was fretting because 

Mr. did not come home, till the oysters 

were all spoiled, rather than she would be 
guilty of the impoliteness of touching one 
in his absence. This was reversing the 
point of good manners: for ceremony is 
an invention to take off the uneasy feeling 
which we derive from knowing ourselves to 
be less the object of love and esteem with 
a fellow-creature than some other person 
is. It endeavors to make up, by superior 
attentions in little points, for that invidious 
preference which it is forced to deny in the 
greater. Had Testacea kept the oysters 
back for me, and withstood her husband's 
importunities to go to supper, she would 
have acted according to the strict rules of 
propriety. I know no ceremony that ladies 
303 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



are bound to observe to their husbands, 
beyond the point of a modest behavior and 
decorum: therefore I must protest against 
the vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at 
her own table sent away a dish of Morellas, 
which I was applying to with great good 
will, to her husband at the other end of the 
table, and recommended a plate of less ex- 
traordinary gooseberries to my unwedded 
palate in their stead. Neither can I excuse 

the wanton affront of . 

But I am weary of stringing up all my 
married acquaintance by Roman denomina- 
tions. Let them amend and change their 
manners, or I promise to record the full- 
length English of their names, to the terror 
of all such desperate offenders in future. 



304 



ON SOME OP THE OLD ACTORS 



THE casual sight of an old Play Bill, 
which I picked up the other day — I 
know not by what chance it was pre- 
served so long— tempts me to call to mind 
a few of the Players, who make the princi- 
pal figure in it. It presents the cast of 
parts in the Twelfth-Night, at the old 
Drury Lane Theater two and thirty years 
ago. There is something very touching in 
these old remembrances. They make us 
think how we once used to read a Play Bill 
—not, as now per ad venture, singling out a 
favorite performer, and casting a negligent 
eye over the rest; but spelling out every 
name, down to the very mutes and ser- 
vants of the scene;— when it was a matter 
of no small moment to us whether Whit- 
field, or Packer, took the part of Fabian; 
when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore— 
names of small account— had an impor- 
tance, beyond what we can be content to 
attribute now to the time's best actors.— 

"Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore."— What a 
full Shaksperian sound it carries! how fresh 
20 305 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



to memory arise the image and the manner 
of the gentle actor! Those who have only 
seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or 
fifteen years, can have no adequate notion 
of her performance of such parts as Ophelia; 
Helena in All 's Well that Ends Well; and 
Viola, in this play. Her voice had latterly 
acquired a coarseness, which suited well 
enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but in 
those days it sank, with her steady, melting 
eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts— in 
which her memory now chiefly lives— in her 
youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. 
There is no giving an account how she de- 
livered the disguised story of her love for 
Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had 
foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmo- 
nious period, line necessarily following line, 
to make up the music— yet I have heard it 
so spoken, or rather read, not without its 
grace and beauty— but, when she had de- 
clared her sister's history to be a "blank," 
and that she "never told her love," there 
was a pause, as if the story had ended— and 
then the image of the "worm in the bud" 
came up as a new suggestion— and the 
heightened image of "Patience" still fol- 
lowed after that as by some growing (and 
not mechanical) process, thought springing 
up after thought, I would almost say, as 
306 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS 

they were watered by her tears. So in 
those fine lines— 

Write loyal cantons of contemned love- 
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills- 
there was no preparation made in the fore- 
going image for that which was to follow. 
She used no rhetoric in her passion; or it 
was nature's own rhetoric, most legitimate 
then, when it seemed altogether without 
rule or law. 

Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in 
the pride of her beauty, made an admirable 
Olivia. She was particularly excellent in 
her unbending scenes in conversation with 
the Clown. I have seen some Olivias— and 
those very sensible actresses too— who in 
these interlocutions have seemed to set 
their wits at the jester, and to vie conceits 
with him in downright emulation. But she 
used him for her sport, like what he was, 
to trifle a leisure sentence or two with, and 
then to be dismissed, and she to be the 
Great Lady still. She touched the imperi- 
ous fantastic humor of the character with 
nicety. Her fine spacious person filled the 
scene. 

The part of Malvolio has, in my judgment, 
been so often misunderstood, and the gen- 
eral merits of the actor, who then played it, 
307 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



so unduly appreciated, that I shall hope for 
pardon, if I am a little prolix upon these 
points. 

Of all the actors who flourished in my 
time— a melancholy phrase if taken aright, 
reader— Bensley had most of the swell of 
soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic 
conceptions, the emotions consequent upon 
the presentment of a great idea to the 
fancy. He had the true poetical enthusi- 
asm—the rarest faculty among players. 
None that I remember possessed even a 
portion of that fine madness which he threw 
out in Hotspur's famous rant about glory, 
or the transports of the Venetian incendiary 
at the vision of the fired city. His voice 
had the dissonance, and at times the in- 
spiriting effect, of the trumpet. His gait 
was uncouth and stiff, hut no way embar- 
rassed by affectation; and the thoroughbred 
gentleman was uppermost in every move- 
ment. He seized the moment of passion 
with greatest truth; like a faithful clock, 
never striking before the time; never antici- 
pating or leading you to anticipate. He 
was totally destitute of trick and artifice. 
He seemed come upon the stage to do the 
poet's message simply, and he did it with 
as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer 
deliver the errands of the gods. He let the 
308 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS 

passion or the sentiment do its own work 
without prop or bolstering. He would have 
scorned to mountebank it; and betrayed 
none of that cleverness which is the bane 
of serious acting. For this reason, his lago 
was the only endurable one which I remem- 
ber to have seen. No spectator, from his 
action, could divine more of his artifice than 
Othello was supposed to do. His confes- 
sions in soliloquy alone put you in pos- 
session of the mystery. There were no 
by-intimations to make the audience fancy 
their own discernment so much greater 
than that of the Moor— who commonly 
stands like a great helpless mark, set up 
for mine Ancient, and a quantity of barren 
spectators, to shoot their bolts at. The 
lago of Bensley did not go to work so 
grossly. There was a triumphant tone 
about the character, natural to a general 
consciousness of power; but none of that 
petty vanity which chuckles and cannot 
contain itself upon any little successful 
stroke of its knavery— as is common with 
your small villains, and green probationers 
in mischief. It did not clap or crow before 
its time. It was not a man setting his wits 
at a child, and winking all the while at other 
children, who are mightily pleased at being 
let into the secret; but a consummate vil- 
309 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



lain entrapping a noble nature into toils 
against which no discernment was avail- 
able, where the manner was as fathomless 
as the purpose seemed dark, and without 
motive. The part of Malvolio, in the Twelfth 
Night, was performed by Bensley with a 
richness and a dignity, of which (to judge 
from some recent castings of that char- 
acter) the very tradition must be worn out 
from the stage. No manager in those days 
would have dreamed of giving it to Mr. 
Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons; when Bensley 
was occasionally absent from the theater, 
John Kemble thought it no derogation to 
succeed to the part. Malvolio is not essen- 
tially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by 
accident. He is cold, austere, repelling; 
but dignified, consistent, and, for what ap- 
pears, rather of an overstretched morality. 
Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan; 
and he might have worn his gold chain with 
honor in one of our old Roundhead families, 
in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady Fair- 
fax. But his morality and his manners are 
misplaced in Illyria. He is opposed to the 
proper levities of the piece, and falls in the 
unequal contest. Still his pride, or his 
gravity (call it which you will), is inherent, 
and native to the man, not mock or affected, 
which latter only are the fit objects to ex- 
310 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS 

cite laughter. His quality is at the best 
unlovely, but neither buffoon nor contemp- 
tible. His bearing is lofty, a little above his 
station, but probably not much above his 
deserts. We see no reason why he should 
not have been brave, honorable, accom- 
plished. His careless committal of the ring 
to the ground (which he was commissioned 
to restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity 
of birth and feeling. His dialect on all oc- 
casions is that of a gentleman and a man of 
education. We must not confound him 
with the eternal old, low steward of comedy. 
He is master of the household to a great 
princess; a dignity probably conferred upon 
him for other respects than age or length 
of service. Olivia, at the first indication of 
his supposed madness, declares that she 
"would not have him miscarry for half of 
her dowry." Does this look as if the char- 
acter was meant to appear little or insig- 
nificant? Once, indeed, she accuses him to 
his face— of what?— of being "sick of self- 
love,"— but with a gentleness and consider- 
ateness, which could not have been, if she 
had not thought that this particular in- 
firmity shaded some virtues. His rebuke 
to the knight and his sottish revelers is 
sensible and spirited; and when we take 
into consideration the unprotected condi- 
311 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



tion of his mistress, and the strict regard 
with which her state of real or dissembled 
mourning would draw the eyes of the world 
upon her house-affairs, Malvolio might feel 
the honor of the family in some sort in his 
keeping; as it appears not that Olivia had 
any more brothers, or kinsmen, to look to 
it— for Sir Toby had dropped all such nice 
respects at the buttery-hatch. That Mal- 
volio was meant to be represented as pos- 
sessing estimable qualities, the expression 
of the Duke, in his anxiety to have him 
reconciled, almost infers: "Pursue him, and 
entreat him to a peace." Even in his abused 
state of chains and darkness, a sort of 
greatness seems never to desert him. He 
argues highly and well with the supposed 
Sir Topas, and philosophizes gallantly upon 
his straw.^ There must have been some 
shadow of worth about the man; he must 
have been something more than a mere 
vapor — a thing of straw, or Jack in ofRce 
— before Fabian and Maria could have ven- 
tured sending him upon a courting-errand 
to Olivia. There was some consonancy (as 

1 Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild 

fowl? 
Mai. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a 

bird. 
Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion ? 
Mai. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his 

opinion, 

312 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS 

he would say) in the undertaking, or the 
jest would have heen too bold even for that 
house of misrule. 

Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part 
an air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, 
spake, and moved like an old Castilian. 
He was starch, spruce, opinionated, but his 
superstructure of pride seemed bottomed 
upon a sense of worth. There was some- 
thing in it beyond the coxcomb. It was big 
and swelling, but you could not be sure that 
it was hollow. You might wish to see it 
taken down, but you felt that it was upon 
an elevation. He was magnificent from the 
outset; but when the decent sobrieties of 
the character began to give way, and the 
poison of self-love, in his conceit of the 
Countess's affection, gradually to work, you 
would have thought that the hero of La 
Mancha in person stood before you. How 
he went smiling to himself! with what 
ineffable carelessness would he twirl his 
gold chain! what a dream it was! you were 
infected with the illusion, and did not wish 
that it should be removed! you had no room 
for laughter! if an unseasonable reflection 
of morality obtruded itself, it was a deep 
sense of the pitiable infirmity of man's na- 
ture, that can lay him open to such frenzies 
—but, in truth, you rather admired than 
313 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



pitied the lunacy while it lasted— you felt 
that an hour of such mistake was worth an 
age with the eyes open. Who would not 
wish to live but for a day in the conceit of 
such a lady's love as Olivia? Why, the 
Duke would have given his principality but 
for a quarter of a minute, sleeping or wak- 
ing, to have been so deluded. The man 
seemed to tread upon air, to taste manna, 
to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate 
Hyperion. 0! shake not the castles of his 
pride— endure yet for a season, bright 
moments of confidence— "stand still, ye 
watches of the element," that Malvolio may 
be still in fancy fair Olivia's lord!— but fate 
and retribution say no — I hear the mis- 
chievous titter of Maria— the witty taunts 
of Sir Toby— the still more insupportable 
triumph of the foolish knight— the coun- 
terfeit Sir Topas is unmasked— and "thus 
the whirligig of time," as the true clown 
hath it, " brings in his revenges." I confess 
that I never saw the catastrophe of this 
character, while Bensley played it, without 
a kind of tragic interest. There was good 
foolery too. Few now remember Dodd. 
What an Aguecheek the stage lost in him ! 
Lovegrove, who came nearest to the old 
actors, revived the character some few sea- 
sons ago, and made it sufficiently grotesque; 
314 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS 

but Dodd was it, as it came out of nature's 
hands. It might be said to remain in puris 
naturalibus. In expressing slowness of 
apprehension, this actor surpassed all 
others. You could see the first dawn of an 
idea stealing slowly over his countenance, 
climbing up by little and little, with a pain- 
ful process, till it cleared up at last to the 
fullness of a twilight conception— its high- 
est meridian. He seemed to keep back his 
intellect, as some have had the power to 
retard their pulsation. The balloon takes 
less time in filling than it took to cover the 
expansion of his broad moony face over all 
its quarters with expression. A glimmer of 
understanding would appear in a corner of 
his eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. 
A part of his forehead would catch a little 
intelligence, and be a long time in commu- 
nicating it to the remainder. 

I am ill at dates, but I think it is now 
better than five and twenty years ago, that 
walking in the gardens of Gray's Inn— they 
were then far finer than they are now— the 
accursed Verulam Buildings had not en- 
croached upon all the east side of them, 
cutting out delicate green crankles, and 
shouldering away one of two of the stately 
alcoves of the terrace— the survivor stands 
gaping and relationless as if it remembered 
315 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



its brother— they are still the best gardens 
of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved 
Temple not forgotten— have the gravest 
character; their aspect being altogether 
reverend and law-breathing— Bacon has 
left the impress of his foot upon their gravel 
walks— taking my afternoon solace on a 
summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a 
comely sad personage came towards me, 
whom, from his grave air and deportment, 
I judged to be one of the old Benchers of 
the Inn. He had a serious, thoughtful 
forehead, and seemed to be in meditations 
of mortality. As I have an instinctive awe 
of old Benchers, I was passing him with 
that sort of subindicative token of respect 
which one is apt to demonstrate towards a 
venerable stranger, and which rather de- 
notes an inclination to greet him, than any 
positive motion of the body to that effect— 
a species of humility and will-worship which 
I observe, nine times out of ten, rather 
puzzles than pleases the person it is offered 
to— when the face turning full upon me 
strangely identified itself with that of Dodd. 
Upon close inspection I was not mistaken. 
But could this sad, thoughtful countenance 
be the same vacant face of folly which I 
had hailed so often under circumstances of 
gaiety; which I had never seen without a 
316 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS 

smile, or recognized but as the usher of 
mirth; that looked out so formally flat in 
Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so 
impotently busy in Backbite; so blankly 
divested of all meaning, or resolutely ex- 
pressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, and 
a thousand agreeable impertinences? Was 
this the face— full of thought and careful- 
ness—that had so often divested itself at 
will of every trace of either to give me 
diversion, to clear my cloudy face for two 
or three hours at least of its furrows ! Was 
this the face— manly, sober, intelligent— 
which I had so often despised, made mocks 
at, made merry with! The remembrance 
of the freedoms which I had taken with it 
came upon me with a reproach of insult. 
I could have asked it pardon. I thought 
it looked upon me with a sense of injury. 
There is something strange as well as sad 
in seeing actors— your pleasant fellows 
particularly— subjected to and suffering 
the common lot;— their fortunes, their casu- 
alties, their deaths, seem to belong to the 
scene, their actions to be amenable to poetic 
justice only. We can hardly connect them 
with more awful responsibilities. The death 
of this fine actor took place shortly after 
this meeting. He had quitted the stage 
some months; and, as I learned afterwards, 
317 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



had been in the habit of resorting daily to 
these gardens, almost to the day of his 
decease. In these serious walks, probably, 
he was divesting himself of many scenic 
and some real vanities— weaning himself 
from the frivolities of the lesser and the 
greater theater— doing gentle penance for a 
life of no very reprehensible fooleries — tak- 
ing off by degrees the buffoon mask which 
he might feel he had worn too long— and 
rehearsing for a more solemn cast of part. 
Dying, he "put on the weeds of Dominic." ^ 
If few can remember Dodd, many yet 
living will not easily forget the pleasant 
creature, who in those days enacted the 
part of the Clown to Dodd's Sir Andrew.— 
Richard, or rather Dicky Suett— for so in 
his lifetime he delighted to be called, and 
time hath ratified the appellation — lieth 
buried on the north side of the cemetery of 
Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and 
tender years were dedicated. There are 

1 Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice 
collection of old English literature. I should judge him to 
have been a man of wit. I know one instance of an im- 
promptu which no length of study could have bettered. My 
merry friend, Jem White, had seen him one evening in Ague- 
cheek, and recognizing Dodd the next day in Fleet Street, 
was irresistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him as 
the identical Knight of the preceding evening with a " Save 
you, Sir Andrew." Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this un- 
usual address from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking, 
wave of the hand, put him off with an "Away, Fool." 

318 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS 

who do yet remember him at that period— 
his pipe clear and harmonious. He would 
often speak of his chorister days, when he 
was "cherub Dicky." 

What clipped his wings, or made it ex- 
pedient that he should exchange the holy 
for the profane state; whether he had lost 
his good voice (his best recommendation to 
that office), like Sir John, "with hallooing 
and singing of anthems"; or whether he 
was adjudged to lack something, even in 
those early years, of the gravity indispen- 
sable to an occupation which professeth to 
"commerce with the skies,"— I could never 
rightly learn; but we find him, after the 
probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting 
to a secular condition and become one of us. 

I think he was not altogether of that 
timber out of which cathedral seats and 
sounding-boards are hewed. But if a glad 
heart— kind, and therefore glad— be any 
part of sanctity, then might the robe of 
Motley, with which he invested himself 
with so much humility after his depriva- 
tion, and which he wore so long with so 
much blameless satisfaction to himself and 
to the public, be accepted for a surplice— 
his white stole, and albe. 

The first-fruits of his secularization was 
an engagement upon the boards of Old 
319 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



Drury, at which theater he commenced, as 
I have been told, with adopting the manner 
of Parsons in old men's characters. At the 
period in which most of us knew him, he 
was no more an imitator than he was in 
any true sense himself imitable. 

He was the Robin Goodfellow of the stage. 
He came in to trouble all things with a wel- 
come perplexity, himself no whit troubled 
for the matter. He was known, like Puck, by 
his note— Ha! Ha! iJa.^— sometimes deep- 
ening to Ho! Ho! Ho! with an irresistible 
accession, derived, perhaps, remotely from 
his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his 
prototype of— La! Thousands of hearts 
yet respond to the chuckling La! of Dicky 
Suett, brought back to their remembrance 
by the faithful transcript of his friend 
Mathews's mimicry. The "force of nature 
could no further go." He drolled upon the 
stock of these two syllables richer than the 
cuckoo. 

Care, that troubles all the world, was 
forgotten in his composition. Had he had 
but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he 
could never have supported himself upon 
those two spider's strings, which served 
him (in the latter part of his unmixed 
existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple 
must have made him totter, a sigh have 
320 



ON SOME OP THE OLD ACTORS 

puffed him down; the weight of a frown had 
staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his 
balance. But on he went, scrambling upon 
those airy stilts of his, with Robin Good- 
fellow, "thorough brake, thorough briar," 
reckless of a scratched face or a torn 
doublet. 

Shakspere foresaw him, when he framed 
his fools and jesters. They have all the 
true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling 
gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready 
midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest; in 
words, light as air, venting truths deep as 
the center; with idlest rhymes tagging 
conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in 
the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery- 
hatch. 

Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to 
be more of personal favorites with the town 
than any actors before or after. The dif- 
ference, I take it, was this:— Jack was more 
beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral 
pretensions. Dicky was more liked for his 
sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. 
Your whole conscience stirred with Bannis- 
ter's performance of Walter in the Children 
in the Wood— but Dicky seemed like a thing, 
as Shakspere says of Love, too young to 
know what conscience is. He put us into 
Vesta's days. Evil fled before him— not as 
21 321 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



from Jack, as from an antagonist,— but 
because it could not touch him, any more 
than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered 
from the burden of that death; and, when 
Death came himself, not in metaphor, to 
fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Rob- 
ert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, 
that he received the last stroke, neither 
varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor 
tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy 
to have been recorded in his epitaph— 
La! La! Bobby! 

The elder Palmer (of stage-treading ce- 
lebrity) commonly played Sir Toby in those 
days; but there is a solidity of wit in the 
jests of that half-Falstaff which he did not 
quite fill out. He was as much too showy 
as Moody (who sometimes took the part) 
was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin 
there was an air of swaggering gentility 
about Jack Palmer. He was a gentleman 
with a slight infusion of the footman. His 
brother Bob (of recenter memory), who was 
his shadow in everything while he lived, 
and dwindled into less than a shadow after- 
wards—was a gentleman with a little 
stronger infusion of the latter ingredient ; 
that was all. It is amazing how a little of 
the more or less makes a difference in these 
things. When you saw Bobby in the Duke's 
322 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS 

Servant/ you said, "What a pity such a 
pretty fellow was only a servant!" When 
you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, 
you thought you could trace his promotion 
to some lady of quality who fancied the 
handsome fellow in his topknot, and had 
bought him a commission. Therefore Jack 
in Dick Amlet was insuperable. 

Jack had two voices, both plausible, hypo- 
critical, and insinuating; but his secondary 
or supplemental voice still more decisively 
histrionic than his common one. It was 
reserved for the spectator; and the dramatis 
personce were supposed to know nothing at 
all about it. The lies of Young Wilding, and 
the sentiments in Joseph Surface, were thus 
marked out in a sort of italics to the audi- 
ence. This secret correspondence with the 
company before the curtain (which is the 
bane and death of tragedy) has an extremely 
happy effect in some kinds of comedy, in 
the more highly artificial ^comedy of Con- 
greve or of Sheridan especially, where the 
absolute sense of reality (so indispensable 
to scenes of interest) is not required, or 
would rather interfere to diminish your 
pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe 
in such characters as Surface— the villain 
of artificial comedy — even while you read or 

1 High Life Below Stairs. 

323 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



see them. If you did, they would shock and 
not divert you. When Ben, in Love for 
Love, returns from sea, the following ex- 
quisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting 
with his father:— 

Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary 
league, Ben, since I saw thee. 

Ben. Ey, ey, been. Been far enough, an that 
be all.— Well, father, and how do all at home? 
how does brother Dick and brother Val? 

Sir Sampson. Dick ! body o' me, Dick has been 
dead these two years. I writ you word when you 
were at Leghorn. 

Ben. Mess, that 's true; Marry, I had forgot. 
Dick 's dead, as you say— well, and how?— I have 
a many questions to ask you. 

Here is an instance of insensibility, which 
in real life would be revolting, or rather in 
real life could not have coexisted with the 
warm-hearted temperament of the char- 
acter. But when you read it in the spirit 
with which such playful selections and 
specious combinations rather than strict 
metaphrases of nature should be taken, or 
when you saw Bannister play it, it neither 
did, nor does, wound the moral sense at all. 
For what is Ben— the pleasant sailor which 
Bannister gives us— but a piece of satire— 
a creation of Congreve's fancy— a dreamy 
combination of all the accidents of a sailor's 
324 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS 

character— his contempt of money— his 
credulity to women— with that necessary 
estrangement from home which it is just 
within the verge of credibility to suppose 
might produce such an hallucination as is 
here described. We never think the worse 
of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon 
his character. But when an actor comes, 
and instead of the delightful phantom— the 
creature dear to half-belief —which Bannis- 
ter exhibited— displays before our eyes a 
downright concretion of a Wapping sailor 
—a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar— and no- 
thing else— when instead of investing it 
with a delicious confusedness of the head, 
and a veering undirected goodness of pur- 
pose—he gives to it a downright daylight 
understanding, and a full consciousness of 
its actions; thrusting forward the sensi- 
bilities of the character with a pretense as 
if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be 
judged by them alone— we feel the discord 
of the thing; the scene is disturbed; a real 
man has got in among the dramatis per- 
sonoR, and puts them out. We want the 
sailor turned out. We feel that his true 
place is not behind the curtain, but in the 
first or second gallery. 



325 



ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY 
OF THE LAST CENTURY « 



THE artificial Comedy, or Comedy of 
manners, is quite extinct on our 
stage. Congreve and Farquhar show 
their heads once in seven years only, to be 
exploded and put down instantly. The 
times cannot bear them. Is it for a few 
wild speeches, an occasional license of dia- 
logue? I think not altogether. The busi- 
ness of their dramatic characters will not 
stand the moral test. We screw everything 
up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a 
dream, the passing pageant of an evening, 
startles us in the same way as the alarm- 
ing indications of profligacy in a son or ward 
in real life should startle a parent or guar- 
dian. We have no such middle emotions as 
dramatic interests left. We see a stage 
libertine playing his loose pranks of two 
hours' duration, and of no after conse- 
quence, with the severe eyes which inspect 
real vices with their bearings upon two 
worlds. We are spectators to a plot or 
326 



COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY 

intrigue (not reducible in life to the point 
of strict morality), and take it all for truth. 
We substitute a real for a dramatic person, 
and judge him accordingly. We try him in 
our courts, from which there is no appeal 
to the dramatis personcBy his peers. We 
have been spoiled with— not sentimental 
comedy— but a tyrant far more pernicious 
to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, 
the exclusive and all-devouring drama of 
common life; where the moral point is 
everything; where, instead of the fictitious 
half-believed personages of the stage (the 
phantoms of old comedy), we recognize our- 
selves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, 
patrons, enemies,— the same as in life,— 
with an interest in what is going on so 
hearty and substantial, that we cannot 
afford our moral judgment, in its deepest 
and most vital results, to compromise or 
slumber for a moment. What is there 
transacting, by no modification is made to 
affect us in any other manner than the 
same events or characters would do in our 
relationships of life. We carry our fireside 
concerns to the theater with us. We do 
not go thither like our ancestors, to escape 
from the pressure of reality, so much as to 
confirm our experience of it; to make as- 
surance double, and take a bond of fate. 
327 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



We must live our toilsome lives twice over, 
as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses 
to descend twice to the shades. All that 
neutral ground of character, which stood 
between vice and virtue; or which in fact 
was indifferent to neither, where neither 
properly was called in question; that happy 
breathing-place from the burden of a per- 
petual moral questioning— the sanctuary 
and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry— is 
broken up and disfranchised, as injurious 
to the interests of society. The privileges 
of the place are taken away by law. We dare 
not dally with images, or names, of wrong. 
We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We 
dread infection from the scenic representa- 
tion of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. 
In our anxiety that our morality should not 
take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket 
surtout of precaution against the breeze 
and sunshine. 

I confess for myself that (with no great 
delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a 
season to take an airing beyond the diocese 
of the strict conscience,— not to live always 
in the precincts of the law courts,— but now 
and then, for a dream-while or so, to ima- 
gine a world with no meddling restrictions 
—to get into recesses, whither the hunter 
cannot follow me— 

.328 



COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY 

—Secret shades 

Of woody Ida's inmost grove, 

While yet there was no fear of Jove. 

I come back to my cage and my restraint 
the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear 
my shackles more contentedly for having 
respired the breath of an imaginary free- 
dom. I do not know how it is with others, 
but I feel the better always for the perusal 
of one of Congreve's— nay, why should I 
not add even of Wycherley's — comedies. I 
am the gayer at least for it; and I could 
never connect those sports of a witty fancy 
in any shape with any result to be drawn 
from them to imitation in real life. They 
are a world of themselves almost as much 
as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, 
male or female (with few exceptions they 
are alike), and place it in a modern play, 
and my virtuous indignation shall rise 
against the profligate wretch as warmly as 
the Catos of the pit could desire; because 
in a modern play I am to judge of the right 
and the wrong. The standard of police is 
the measure of political justice. The atmo- 
sphere will blight it; it cannot live here. 
It has got into a moral world, where it has 
no business, from which it must needs fall 
headlong; as dizzy, and incapable of making 
a stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that 
22 329 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



has wandered unawares into the sphere of 
one of his Good Men, or Angels. But in 
its own world do we feel the creature is so 
very bad?— The Fainalls and the Mirabels, 
the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, 
in their own sphere, do not offend my moral 
sense; in fact, they do not appeal to it at 
all. They seem engaged in their proper 
element. They break through no laws or 
conscientious restraints. They know of 
none. They have got out of Christen- 
dom into the land— what shall I call it?— of 
cuckoldry— the Utopia of gallantry, where 
pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect 
freedom. It is altogether a speculative 
scene of things, which has no reference 
whatever to the world that is. No good 
person can be justly offended as a spectator, 
because no good person suffers on the 
stage. Judged morally, every character 
in these plays— the few exceptions only 
are mistakes— is alike essentially vain and 
worthless. The great art of Congreve is 
especially shown in this, that he has en- 
tirely excluded from his scenes— some little 
generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps 
excepted— not only anything like a faultless 
character, but any pretensions to goodness 
or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he 
did this designedly, or instinctively, the 
330 



COMEDY OP THE LAST CENTURY 

effect is as happy as the design (if design) 
was bold. I used to wonder at the strange 
power which his Way of the World in partic- 
ular possesses of interesting you all along 
in the pursuits of characters, for whom you 
absolutely care nothing— for you neither 
hate nor love his personages— and I think 
it is owing to this very indifference for any, 
that you endure the whole. He has spread 
a privation of moral light, I will call it, 
rather than by the ugly name of palpable 
darkness, over his creations; and his shad- 
ows flit before you without distinction or 
preference. Had he introduced a good char- 
acter, a single gush of moral feeling, a 
revulsion of the judgment to actual life and 
actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would 
have only lighted to the discovery of de- 
formities, which now are none, because we 
think them none. 

Translated into real life, the characters 
of his, and his friend Wycherley's dramas, 
are profligates and strumpets,— the busi- 
ness of their brief existence, the undivided 
pursuit of lawless- gallantry. No other 
spring of action, or possible motive of con- 
duct, is recognized; principles which, uni- 
versally acted upon, must reduce this frame 
of things to a chaos. But we do them 
wrong in so translating them. No such 
331 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



effects are produced, in their world. When 
we are among them, we are amongst a 
chaotic people. We are not to judge them 
by our usages. No reverend institutions 
are insulted by their proceedings— for they 
have none among them. No peace of fami- 
lies is violated— for no family ties exist 
among them. No purity of the marriage 
bed is stained— for none is supposed to have 
a being. No deep affections are disquieted, 
—no holy wedlock bands are snapped asun- 
der—for affection's depth and wedded faith 
are not of the growth of that soil. There 
is neither right nor wrong,— gratitude or 
its opposite,— claim or duty,— paternity or 
sonship.— Of what consequence is it to 
Virtue, or how is she at all concerned about 
it, whether Sir Simon or Dapperwit steal 
away Miss Martha; or who is the father of 
Lord Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant's children? 
The whole is a passing pageant, where 
we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, 
for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs 
and mice. But, like Don Quixote, we take 
part against the puppets, and quite as im- 
pertinently. We dare not contemplate an 
Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our cox- 
combical moral sense is for a little tran- 
sitory ease excluded. We have not the 
courage to imagine a state of things for 
332 



COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY 

which there is neither reward nor punish- 
ment. We cling to the painful necessities 
of shame and blame. We would indict our 
very dreams. 

Amidst the mortifying circumstances 
attendant upon growing old, it is something 
to have seen the School for Scandal in its 
glory. This comedy grew out of Congreve 
and Wycherley, but gathered some allays 
of the sentimental comedy which followed 
theirs. It is impossible that it should be 
now acted, though it continues, at long in- 
tervals, to be announced in the bills. Its 
hero, when Palmer played it at least, was 
Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay 
boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, 
the measured step, the insinuating voice 
—to express it in a word— the downright 
acted villainy of the part, so different from 
the pressure of conscious actual wicked- 
ness,— the hypocritical assumption of hy- 
pocrisy,— which made Jack so deservedly a 
favorite in that character, I must needs 
conclude the present generation of play- 
goers more virtuous than myself, or more 
dense. I freely confess that he divided the 
palm with me with his better brother; that, 
in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but 
there are passages,— like that, for instance, 
where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance 
333 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



to a poor relation,— incongruities which 
Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt 
to join the artificial with the sentimental 
comedy, either of which must destroy the 
other— but over these obstructions Jack's 
manner floated him so lightly, that a re- 
fusal from him no more shocked you, than 
the easy compliance of Charles gave you in 
reality any pleasure; you got over the paltry 
question as quickly as you could, to get back 
into the regions of pure comedy, where no 
cold moral reigns. The highly artificial 
manner of Palmer in this character counter- 
acted every disagreeable impression which 
you might have received from the contrast, 
supposing them real, between the two bro- 
thers. You did not believe in Joseph with 
the same faith with which you believed in 
Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, 
the former a no less pleasant poetical foil 
to it. The comedy, I have said, is incon- 
gruous; a mixture of Congreve with senti- 
mental incompatibilities; the gaiety upon 
the whole is buoyant; but it required the 
consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the 
discordant elements. 

A player with Jack's talents, if we had 

one now, would not dare to do the part in 

the same manner. He would instinctively 

avoid every turn which might tend to un- 

334 



COMEDY OP THE LAST CENTURY 

realize, and so to make the character fas- 
cinating. He must take his cue from his 
spectators, who would expect a bad man 
and a good man as rigidly opposed to each 
other as the death-beds of those geniuses 
are contrasted in the prints, which I am 
sorry to say have disappeared from the 
windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, 
of St. Paul's Churchyard memory— (an ex- 
hibition as venerable as the adjacent cathe- 
dral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good 
man at the hour of death; where the 
ghastly apprehensions of the former, — and 
truly the grim phantom with his reality of 
a toasting-fork is not to be despised,— so 
finely contrast with the meek complacent 
kissing of the rod,— taking it in like honey 
and butter,— with which the latter submits 
to the scythe of the gentle bleeder. Time, 
who wields his lancet with the apprehen- 
sive finger of a popular young ladies' sur- 
geon. What flesh, like loving grass, would 
not covet to meet half-way the stroke of 
such a delicate mower?— John Palmer was 
twice an actor in this exquisite part. He 
was playing to you all the while that he was 
playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You 
had the first intimation of a sentiment 
before it was on his lips. His altered voice 
was meant to you, and you were to suppose 
335 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage 
perceived nothing at all of it. What was it 
to you if that half reality, the husband, was 
overreached by the puppetry— or the thin 
thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was per- 
suaded it was dying of a plethory? The 
fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were 
not concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed 
from the stage in good time, that he did not 
live to this our age of seriousness. The 
pleasant old Teazle King, too, is gone in 
good time. His manner would scarce have 
passed current in our day. We must love 
or hate— acquit or condemn— censure or 
pity— exert our detestable coxcombry of 
moral judgment upon everything. Joseph 
Surface, to go down now, must be a down- 
right revolting villain— no compromise— 
his first appearance must shock and give 
horror— his specious plausibilities, which 
the pleasurable faculties of our fathers wel- 
comed with such hearty greetings, knowing 
that no harm (dramatic harm even) could 
come, or was meant to come, of them, must 
inspire a cold and killing aversion. Charles 
(the real canting person of the scene— for 
the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior 
legitimate ends, but his brother's profes- 
sions of a good heart center in downright 
self-satisfaction) must be loved, and Joseph 
336 



COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY 

hated. To balance one disagreeable reality 
with another, Sir Peter Teazle must be no 
longer the comic idea of a fretful old bache- 
lor bridegroom, whose teasings, while King 
acted it, were evidently as much played off 
at you, as they were meant to concern any- 
body on the stage,— he must be a real per- 
son, capable in law of sustaining an injury 
—a person towards whom duties are to be 
acknowledged— the genuine crim. con. an- 
tagonist of the villainous seducer Joseph. 
To realize him more, his sufferings under 
his unfortunate match must have the down- 
right pungency of life— must (or should) 
make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, 
just as the same predicament would move 
you in a neighbor or old friend. 

The delicious scenes which give the play 
its name and zest, must affect you in the 
same serious manner as if you heard the 
reputation of a dear female friend attacked 
in your real presence. Crabtree and Sir 
Benjamin— those poor snakes that live but 
in the sunshine of your mirth— must be 
ripened by this hotbed process of realiza- 
tion into asps or amphisbsenas; and Mrs. 
Candor— 0! frightful!— become a hooded 
serpent. 0! who that remembers Parsons 
and Dodd— the wasp and butterfly of the 
School for Scandal— in those two char- 
337 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



acters; and charming natural Miss Pope, 
the perfect gentlewoman as distinguished 
from the fine lady of comedy, in this latter 
part— would forego the true scenic delight 
—the escape from life— the ohlivion of con- 
sequences—the holiday harring out of the 
pedant Reflection— those Saturnalia of two 
or three brief hours, well won from the 
world— to sit instead at one of our modern 
plays— to have his coward conscience (that 
forsooth must not be left for a moment) 
stimulated with perpetual appeals— dulled 
rather, and blunted, as a faculty without 
repose must be— and his moral vanity pam- 
pered with images of notional justice, no- 
tional beneficence, lives saved without the 
spectator's risk, and fortunes given away 
that cost the author nothing? 

No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely 
cast in all its parts as this manager's com- 
edy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. 
Abington in Lady Teazle; and Smith, the 
original Charles, had retired when I first 
saw it. The rest of the characters, with 
very slight exceptions, remained. I remem- 
ber it was then the fashion to cry down 
John Kemble, who took the part of Charles 
after Smith; but, I thought, very unjustly. 
Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the 
eye with a certain gaiety of person. He 
338 



COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY 

brought with him no somber recollections 
of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault 
of having pleased beforehand in lofty dec- 
lamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of 
Richard to atone for. His failure in these 
parts was a passport to success in one of so 
opposite a tendency. But, as far as I could 
judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made 
up for more personal incapacity than he 
had to answer for. His harshest tones in 
this part came steeped and dulcified in good 
humor. He made his defects a grace. His 
exact declamatory manner, as he managed 
it, only served to convey the points of his 
dialogue with more precision. It seemed 
to head the shafts to carry them deeper. 
Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. 
I remember minutely how he delivered 
each in succession, and cannot by any effort 
imagine how any of them could be altered 
for the better. No man could deliver bril- 
liant dialogue— the dialogue of Congreve or 
of Wycherley— because none understood it 
—half so well as John Kemble. His Valen- 
tine, in Love for Love, was, to my recollec- 
tion, faultless. He flagged sometimes in 
the intervals of tragic passion. He would 
slumber over the level parts of an heroic 
character. His Macbeth has been known 
to nod. But he always seemed to me to be 
339 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



particularly alive to pointed and witty dia- 
logue. The relaxing levities of tragedy have 
not been touched by any since him— the 
playful court-bred spirit in which he conde- 
scended to the players in Hamlet— the spor- 
tive relief which he threw into the darker 
shades of Richard— disappeared with him. 
He had his sluggish moods, his torpors— 
but they were the halting-stones and rest- 
ing-place of his tragedy— politic savings, 
and fetches of the breath— husbandry of 
the lungs, where nature pointed him to be 
an economist— rather, I think, than errors 
of the judgment. They were, at worst, less 
painful than the eternal tormenting unap- 
peasable vigilance,— the "lidless dragon 
eyes," of present fashionable tragedy. 



340 



ON THE ACTING OP MUNDEN 



NOT many nights ago I had come home 
from seeing this extraordinary per- 
former in Cockletop; and when I re- 
tired to my pillow, his whimsical image still 
stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten 
sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of 
it, by conjuring up the most opposite asso- 
ciations. I resolved to be serious. I raised 
up the gravest topics of life; private misery, 
public calamity. All would not do: 

—There the antic sate 
Mocking our state— 

his queer visnomy— his bewildering cos- 
tume—all the strange things which he had 
raked together— his serpentine rod swag- 
ging about in his pocket— Cleopatra's tear, 
and the rest of his relics— O'Keefe's wild 
farce, and his wilder commentary— till the 
passion of laughter, like grief in excess, re- 
lieved itself by its own weight, inviting the 
sleep which in the first instance it had 
driven away. 

341 



ESSAYS OP ELIA 



But I was not to escape so easily. No 
sooner did I fall into slumbers, than the 
same image, only more perplexing, assailed 
me in the shape of dreams. Not one Mun- 
den, but five hundred, were dancing before 
me, like the faces which, whether you will 
or no, come when you have been taking 
opium— all the strange combinations, which 
this strangest of all strange mortals ever 
shot his proper countenance into, from the 
day he came commissioned to dry up the 
tears of the town for the loss of the now 
almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power 
of the pencil to have fixed them when I 
awoke! A season or two since, there was 
exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see 
why there should not be a Munden gallery. 
In richness and variety, the latter would 
not fall far short of the former. 

There is one face of Farley, one face of 
Knight, one (but what a one it is !) of Listen; 
but Munden has none that you can properly 
pin down, and call his. When you think 
he has exhausted his battery of looks, in 
unaccountable warfare with your gravity, 
suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set 
of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but 
legion; not so much a comedian, as a com- 
pany. If his name could be multiplied like 
his countenance, it might fill a playbill. 
342 



ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN 

He, and he alone, literally makes faces : ap- 
plied to any other person, the phrase is a 
mere figure, denoting certain modifications 
of the human countenance. Out of some 
invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his 
friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them 
out as easily. I should not be surprised to 
see him some day put out the head of a 
river-horse: or come forth a pewit, or lap- 
wing, some feathered metamorphosis. 

I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Chris- 
topher Curry— in old Dorn ton— diffuse a 
glow of sentiment which has made the pulse 
of a crowded theater beat like that of one 
man; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, 
doing good to the moral heart of a people. 
I have seen some faint approaches to this 
sort of excellence in other players. But in 
the grand grotesque of farce, Munden stands 
out as single and unaccompanied as Ho- 
garth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no 
followers. The school of Munden began, 
and must end, with himself. 

Can any man wonder, like him? can any 
man see ghosts, like him? or fight with his 
own s/iftdozi;— "SESSA"— as he does in that 
strangely neglected thing, the Cobbler of 
Preston — where his alternations from the 
Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Mag- 
nifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the 

343 



ESSAYS OF ELIA 



spectator in as wild a ferment, as if some 
Arabian Night were being acted before him. 
Who like him can throw, or ever attempted 
to throw, a preternatural interest over the 
commonest daily-life objects? A table or 
a joint-stool, in his conception, rises into a 
dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It 
is invested with constellatory importance. 
You could not speak of it with more defer- 
ence, if it were mounted into the firmament. 
A beggar in the hands of Michelangelo, 
says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. 
So the gusto of Munden antiquates and en- 
nobles what it touches. His pots and his 
ladles are as grand and primal as the seeth- 
ing-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic 
vision. A tub of butter, contemplated by 
him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He under- 
stands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He 
stands wondering, amid the commonplace 
materials of life, like primeval man with 
the sun and stars about him. 



344 



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